Poetry: my sister/mi hermana by Heidi Seaborn
“mi sister/mi hermana,” by Heidi Seaborn, is a tender performance of sisterhood, of two women standing in each other’s lives. Butterflies and whipoowills and a blue walled garden—but also choked throats and lions and needles that pierce and pin.
mi sister/mi hermana
~for Frida Kahlo
I have knelt in your garden,
I have slept in your bed—
pinned butterflies brushing overhead.
O to escape. You from your corset
clawing each breath. I, from want
wedged in my throat.
I breathe quietly now as a ghost
or a woman trying not to wake
the lion coiled like a spring beside me.
The vast feathering fields
beyond your blue walled
garden call like the whippoorwill.
Heidi Seaborn
Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director for The Adroit Journal, a New York University MFA candidate and author of an award-winning debut book of poetry Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} from C&R Press/Mastodon Publishing (March 2019). Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards including the International Literary Rita Dove Award in Poetry, Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Missouri Review, The Mississippi Review, Penn Review, Tar River Review and American Journal of Poetry. She is the author of a chapbook Finding My Way Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and a political pamphlet Body Politic (Mount Analogue Press, 2017). She graduated from Stanford University and is on the board of Tupelo Press. www.heidiseabornpoet.com
