A Woman Is a Wound by Alina Kalontarov

In her softest parts she is rosy cheeks and bone meal feeding all the rivers

A Woman Is a Wound

by Alina Kalontarov

She opens her sovereign heart
to the machete of the world
closes her eyes
already somewhere else 
bending a field of wheat 
to the wind
scanning for collapse 
of sturdy things
wings folded in her lap
wings like prayer-
steepled hands.
In her softest parts
she is rosy cheeks 
and bone meal
feeding all the rivers 
that cut through the earth 
bleeding auburn hunger 
down her legs
running toward any joy 
that will have her
stumbling upon it
like she didn’t know
it was there 
like it wasn’t always
digging its chafed finger 
into the gash and asking 
to be healed.

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Title inspired by Suzanne Richardson’s collection, The Softest Part of a Woman is a Wound.

Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Alina Kalontarov, in which she discusses grief, negative space, and the poems that resurrect the dead. About the poem featured above, “A Woman Is a Wound,” she says:

“Suzanne’s work is stunning. Shortly after I wrote this, she and I had a brief conversation around the poem from which the title of her collection was derived. Talk about utterly devastating! Ultimately, we were both writing about the different ways a woman exists as a wound in the world, and how often she is asked to see that as a form of joy, even pleasure. Traditionally, women are taught to derive joy from sacrifice. This isn’t always a bad thing. Consider her capacity for empathy, or motherhood. But often, the pleasure to pain ratio is out of balance.

While there’s no singular narrative for the female experience, the proverbial gash feels universal: a woman opens (her heart, her arms, her mind, her legs) and the machete of the world enters. This does not always involve violence or force. But it almost always involves a request for her to soften around someone else’s hard, unyielding, or demanding edges. It very often involves mending others at the expense of herself. The woman in this poem interprets joy as anything that enters her wound in order to heal itself. It’s hard to explain, but as a woman, I can really relate to the idea of openness as woundedness.”