The Zingara Project

Tag: great weather for MEDIA

  • March Triptych by Margarita Serafimova

    My heart is full – an ocean of swell – with you.
    Everything is green and dense, weighty,
    and swaying bottomless.
    White are the changing faces of the waves.

    *

    My life was inside of me, budding, dark-red
    against my inner skin,
    on a frosty morning,
    when instead of a sky, a radiant emptiness reigned.

    *

    The dying hours are blossoms at dusk.
    You touch me so, my face is trembling.

    —

    Margarita Serafimova is winner of the 2020 Tony Quagliano  Award, and finalist in other contests. She has a chapbook, A Surgery of A Star (https://bit.ly/3jDU793) and two forthcoming collections. Her work appears widely: Nashville Review, LIT, Agenda Poetry, Poetry South, Botticelli, Steam Ticket, Waxwing, A-Minor, Trafika, Noble/ Gas, Obra/ Artifact, Great Weather for Media, Nixes Mate, etc. Visit: shorturl.at/dgpzC.

  • Taming My Mother’s Tongue by Zoë Christopher

    Living too long in glass houses, careless
    now private thoughts on my lips

    I descend into a fleshy silence conjuring
    my mother’s frayed coyote soul. I can hear

    her splintering howl, barbed tongue lashing
    like teeth into my innocence and needs.

    I could not bolt the door against my ripening,
    she said I came to spoil hers. I would learn

    I could not cradle her feral demons, soothe her
    madness without risking the skin of my bones.

    Now too frail to pounce and strike, she’s lost
    and stumbles toward me, a plea in her silence.

    We sit and pray together until the old camellia
    leaves of my childhood glisten in the night rain

    and the moon coaxes golden shadows from
    the dampened scent of winter viburnum.

    And so the sluicing begins, the eloquence
    of water taming my mother’s tongue.

    —

    Zoë Christopher is a photographer and writer who published her first poem at 16. Soon after she was sidetracked, putting food on the table as an ice-cream truck driver, waitress, medical assistant, addictions counselor, astrologer, art installer, bookseller, Holotropic breathworker, and trainer of psychospiritual crisis support. (She didn’t get paid for milking goats, teaching photography, or raising her son!) She holds a Masters in transpersonal psychology, and spent 20+ years working in adolescent and adult crisis intervention and support. Her work has appeared in print in great weather for MEDIA, and online in The Writing Disorder and WordsDance.