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Echoes
Kneading bread. Fertile yeast smell
rises with her thrusting fists, filling
the kitchen. Phantom hands join hers, reddened,
work-raw, knuckles broad, palms wide
and capable: nine generations worth,
women from the shadows doing the work
which moves the day forward.
Cooking, cleaning--some winter afternoons,
she listens past the silence of the old house,
towards the voices of great-grandmothers
as they sooth babies, scold men
and small children, scatter cats underfoot.
When she rests her arms after kneading
or sweeping or washing up bowls
and spoons, she can hear the whispers
of those women, keeping their own troubles
close, and those of their neighbors.
The voices have soaked into the walls
and floors, the horse-hair plaster and hardwood,
oozing out again like sap when the woodstove
warms the rooms: she leans against
a doorframe, feeling the thin coat
of their lives settling over her shoulders,
welcoming and welcomed.
Anne Britting Oleson is a writer with a paying hobby of trying to teach high school English. After
fifteen years out of college, she decided she'd got enough nerve to go back and earn that blasted MFA. She is very
glad she did--in the past couple of years she's had the chance to work with magnificent people such as Laure-Anne Bosselaar,
Theodore Deppe (I love Ted), Baron Wormser and Gray Jacobik. These days she is touring local reading venues with Simply Not Done,
a feast of words by wild women; we’ve recently performed at the Cornelia Street Café in New York City as part of the
Mamapalooza Festival, which was a blast.
She has most recently been published in Animus, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Café Review, Cimarron Review, and a
whole slew of other places: a poem of hers was chosen to appear in Letters to the World, the anthology of the WOM-PO
listserve from Red Hen Press. The Church of St. Materiana, my chapbook, was published in October 2007 by Moon Pie Press;
another chap, The Beauty of It, was published by Sheltering Pines Press in August, 2010.
Email: Anne Britting Oleson
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