Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington

I
I can’t stop buying scissors. I walk into Home Depot for geraniums & lilies, leave with gardening shears, green ergonomic handles. Gelson’s for halibut. Shiny poultry shears. At a garage sale I find a pair of hedge clippers. By December paper cutters, pinking shears, hair trimmers—any blades you want are boxed in the kitchen pantry.


II
Saturday he takes his 14 clubs & disappears. In hot water, I clean scissors. Prop them on the counter before drying with muslin. Each blade I shine with baking soda. In high school I hung with cutters. They used whatever worked: broken glass, coat hangars,paper. Arms tracked with violet scars like stretch marks. Hidden under long-sleeve shirts.


III
Reflections in a Golden Eye: Mrs. Langdon uses garden shears to clip her nipples when she loses her baby. Snip snip—easy as pinching off deadheads. Sunday in January, I hold my left nipple between the blades of barber shears. Warm steel triggers goose bumps. Is a nipple like a finger? Can they sew it back on?


IV
Recurrent dream: blades-down, scissors drop from the ceiling, rattling & hissing. Impale the cherry nightstand, down comforter, my Land’s End bathrobe. I crouch in the tub, rocking to the sound of hail. Open my thigh—blood a rusty penny melting on my tongue.


V
I get an Alabama divorce. He signs the papers & hauls his Titliest clubs, Lazy Boy, & mahogany desk back to Illinois. Parting words: The cat stays with you. I never liked him. I keep Moot, the crystal, & the condo. Start selling the scissors on E-Bay
—box by box.

First appeared in Mademoiselle’s Fingertips (Summer 2008).

KATHE KOLLWITZ by Muriel Rukeyser

[Excerpt]

II.

Women as gates, saying:
"The process is after all, like music:
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so."

A woman pouring her opposites,
"After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?"
"I could not answer this. But I know—
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt
that the life of the workers was beautiful."

She said, "I am groping in the dark."

She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings."

Saying of her husband: "My wish
is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
Often this love has oppressed me;
I wanted to be free.
But often too it has made me
so terribly happy."

She said : "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fell like glittering stars
from our oars."

She said: "As a matter of fact,
I believe
that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
in my work."

She said : "The only technique I can still manage.
It's hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
only the essentials count."

A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me:
"Kollwitz? She's too black-and-white."

Ill

Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole

Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street
the corpse with the baby
floating, on the dark river

A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open ....

1968

Click on the poem's title for a brief bio of Kathe Kollwitz & brief view of her work.