Tooth n Nail

By Emily Duffy

In July of 2016, Emily Duffy put out a call for submissions on her Facebook page. The premise was simple: what does it mean to be a woman? Within months, she received dozens of submissions from nearly 30 contributors hailing from all over the globe.

Tooth n Nail is a collection of womanhood--of stories, poems, images, fragments--of pain, longing, desire, confidence, pleasure, confusion, solidarity, and in-between spaces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483599625

Book preview

D90

EMILY DUFFY

Splinters

MARCIA PASSOS-DUFFY

A Sunday Afternoon

Their sweet faces

hold me,

ground me.

Like honey-dipped lures

he stacks the wood again,

his anger like a box nailed shut.

They laugh and skip around him

while I sit in the sun.

Silent.

He does not raise his eyes.

I cannot look.

Instead, I pretend.

And watch.

Son: head bobbing from side to side as he squeals, runs.

Daughter: knobby legs straddled over a tree branch, swinging, laughing with abandon.

Hair billows to catch the sun,

transparent before landing.

They are beautiful

and they keep me here.

MARCIA PASSOS-DUFFY

The Lake

I go alone

With one towel (set neatly on hard-packed wet sand)

A Fresca

And my pride.

Families wade knee-deep in tepid water

Under the cloudless, blameless sky

Babies, capped with rainbow hats

I close my eyes

And feel salt in my wounds.

My head hits the towel.

Squinting, I discover

A metallic childlike scribble of a plane

Cutting silently across the blue

Its white exposed belly

Floats like a fantasy

Are the people inside 37,000 feet up

Packed with headphones, gin and tonics, coffee

Or startled sleep?

Are they waiting?

To enter the North Pole and continue circling the Earth

To their final destination?

Are they almost there?

But they can’t see me.

And I blot them out with a strand of hair.

And we only hear them

In an echoed boom

Like distant thunder.

SARAH ESCUE

The Darker Half of the Year

After birth, a mother goat eats the placenta to hide

her child from wolves—rebirth through refuge.

Night writes itself around me,

carves my name in clay.

Bloodless womb, altar of hands,

swollen breasts, curdled milk.

To an empty sky I pray,

scrap my skin’s blurred sentences—

this unspeakable grammar.

I’ve never held anything

in my hands long enough to watch it grow.

What I mean is, I hold moth to candle,

let wax & wing dissolve into flame.

What I mean is, in the end we all fall,

ashes to ashes, muscle to dust, or something like it.

SARAH ESCUE

First Birth

1.

his vowels turnlike tarot cards

compress iron ore into slick words

She chokes downrotten apples each evening

swallows all the seeds

is this how She imagined it?

2.

the man with a missing rib

tells Her of birth :: death

the glittering beauty of