Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 3 is now online. Enjoy new poems by M. Ross Henry, Carmen Germain, Catherine Moore, Erin Rodoni, Sarina Bosco, Diana Smith Bolton, SarahJordan Stout, Christina Seymour, Jan Bottiglieri, Sara Henning, Allison Joseph, Corrie Williams Kentner, Anthony Botti, Kathleen Brewin Lewis, Doug Ramspeck, Elise Gregory, Julia Bouwsma, Knud Sorensen (Translated by Michael Goldman), Jess Williard, Adam Penna, Jennifer Stewart Miller, Katie Manning, Eloisa Amezcua, Givhan Jennifer, Ann E. Michael, Simon Perchik, Sara Biggs Chaney, Jacqueline Balderrama, Alessandra Bava, Tina Richardson, and Alina Stefanescu. Reviews of Spencer Reece, Laura Madeline Wiseman, and Anne Marie Macari by David Seter, Corrinne Adams, and Cindy Snow.
Tag Archives: Ann E. Michael
St. Agnes Braids Her Mother’s Hair
by Ann E. Michael
Through the small window in the low-ceilinged room
a triangular swath of late-afternoon sun
pulses past rooftops and colonnades.
Rome stinks. The municipal sewer gasses
its sloughed city offal, its inhumed corpses and ordure,
stewing under the Mediterranean sky.
Another civic holiday, streets stunned into
immobility by citizens headed for circuses.
Agnes and her mother stay home. See—
a girl stands in the dim room facing her mother’s
slim back, focuses on the hanks of hair
she weaves, thoughts like rosaries, a private moment
uncommon in the metropolis, not even a servant
shares the space they make sacred between them.
They illuminate themselves as women do,
not as martyrs but as mother and daughter
tending to the tender and the necessary,
tying up loose strands, pinning it all in place.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 3.
Poet, essayist, educator Ann E. Michael is writing coordinator at DeSales University in Center Valley, PA and the author of four chapbooks of poetry. Her full-length collection, Water-Rites, is available from Brick Road Poetry Press. She has kept up a blog on poetry, nature, art, education, and philosophy since 2011: www.annemichael.wordpress.com.
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