Poetry

water color of earth and eve

Eve From Above

Hit play below to hear Kate Partridge read her poem “Eve from Above” and scroll down for the full text. “Eve From Above” is featured in MQR’s Summer 2020 issue. Eve From Above Enter dipping close to the mountains, the sheep bouldering their positions along the ridge. As long as you can feel the air pressing against the

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portrait of Sally Heming, yellowish

From the Diary of Sally Hemings

“White waves—a bitter dream—my mother’s mother in the lower deck—wet and cold in the blue-black night.

Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, before she knew of white men or the sea.

A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree and touches wine with her hands. A feast prepared. The gods must have a hand in this! A young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands with old friends in new finery, her buba and iro an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree.

Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America; she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria won’t go unless I come along. White waves in the blue-black sea till we land in port.”

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brown and white mix marble background

Seti

The planets rise like white spots in the purple
evening sticking out like a child’s tongue
for a doctor to hold the moonlight to.
In eternity, everything is healthy, but here
even a good family must struggle to get along.

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