Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

Sage-Femme

— after Jessie Redmon Fauset, US, 1882 – 1961

                        ( “sage-femme”  =  “midwife”  )

 

My long-dead body has become your messenger
of emptiness, of fracture.

 

But what is true for you was never truth for me.
Yes, I rationed heartbeats,

 

dove daily between deeps to plumb
the dust of someone’s broken cups

 

for lines of divine intention.
What I really needed was a champion.

 

I built no case against history,
no insult around laundry.

 

My everyday dealings with brilliant men’s airs,
their wear and tear,

 

were a sometime ugliness for me, it’s true.
But “true” was a tight narrow avenue

 

on which I was forced to travel.
To walk it, I kept barely visible.

 

Still, I was useful.
There were no daily rituals

 

for preserving my own significance.
But there was amazement at existence.

 

To be a midwife of words, sentenced to produce —
isn’t that what women do?

 

Some of you live by the word.
Some of us were smothered.

 

Sharon Mesmer’s most recent poetry collection is Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books). Previous collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose), and Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press). Fiction collections are In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (both from Hanging Loose) and Ma Vie à Yonago (in French translation from Hachette). Four poems appear in Postmodern Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). Other anthology appearances include Brooklyn Poets Anthology and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine/The Cut, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Commonweal and Brooklyn Rail. A two-time New York Foundation the Arts fellow, she teaches creative writing at NYU and the New School.

 

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx