17 October 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 3
Anatomy of Change
Everyone has a mother. Came, as a sapling, of the body.
Everyone puts down roots. This is no mishap, trick of the body.
First, dependence is our only enterprise.
The dirt-nuzzle. Sunlight's rough tongue-lick of the body.
First, change happens only to the sky.
Lost in up-gaze, we grow down. How cryptic of the body.
The sky then changes us. (Or, it has been, continues.)
When did we begin to desire self-rule, flip, sick of the body?
Where did o-f fold back to make f-o to meet r?—
of the body's only part one of the diptych, for the body
enjambs whether we want it to or not.
Oh changeling, what have you—tip, or trick—for the body?
About the author:
Stacia M. Fleegal is a graduate of Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing program. Her poetry has appeared in Comstock Review, Asphodel, the Blue Moon Review, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, the Furnace Review, Blood Orange Review, Expository Magazine, Earth's Daughters, Eclectic Muse, Panamowa: A New Lit Order, and Silenced Press, has been accepted for inclusion in the anthology Women. Period.: Women Writing About Menstruation (Spinsters Ink Press, 2008), and is forthcoming in Minnetonka Review and White Pelican Review. Her poetry chapbook, A Fling with the Ground, was recently released by Finishing Line Press. Her essay "Like Mother-Daughter, Like Daughter-Mother: Constructs of Motherhood in Three Generations of Gilmore Girls" will be published in an anthology of essays about the series, compiled by women's studies faculty at SUNY Stony Brook and forthcoming in 2008 by McFarland. In 2006, her poetry won first place in the graduate division of the Kentuckiana Metroversity Writing Competition and placed as a special merit finalist in Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award in Poetry contest. She is co-founder and co-editor of Blood Lotus, an online literary journal, a poetry editor for New Sins Press, and coordinator in the journals department of the University of Nebraska Press.
For further reading:
Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 7, No. 3, where "Anatomy of Change" ran on October 17, 2007. List other work with these same labels: poetry, ghazal.
