I’ve grown to love the sonnet form over the last few years, a perfect pocket for holding those quarrels we have with ourselves (a definition of poetry offered by William Butler Yeats.) Here is a fine one by LaWanda Walters of North Avondale.
How Girls Walk Through the Eye of a Needle
The girls are getting slimmer now as if, perhaps,
to keep themselves from mothers’ fates.
They float in thin blouses above the fat plates,
their bodies forced like flowers into shape.
Not eating gives them a high window ledge
from which to contemplate life—an ascetic,
cloistered place. On the back pocket of jeans they like,
a tiny, red-inked Buddha smiles. “True Religion”
jeans are hard to get into, expensive and just
for the thinnest. I say, out loud, “it’s like binding feet,”
embarrassing my daughter. But I did think
of those rich-girl feet that could not walk right—
at night they’d unwind the binding and the stink
drove husbands wild. Girls turn to bone so love will last.
LaWanda Walters
—First published in Danse Macabre (Issue 79, May 2014)
—Reprinted in Light Is the Odalisque (Press 53, Silver Concho Poetry Series, 2016)
Join us for the Cincinnati Poetry Month Daily Project Reading on Wednesday, April 26, 7 pm at People’s Liberty, 1805 Elm Street, Over the Rhine
Pauletta Hansel 