United States, (b. 1991)
Pig Woman
- A blur of soft pink shaped
- into a woman’s profile/the nebulous bulk
- of a perhaps-swine. The background
- of red-brown is her hair/is the dirt
- of the pig’s home. There are lips,
- breasts, hands folded at rest. Hooves
- and the knob of a tail. I stare
- at the place where an eye
- should be. I burden the blank
- face with my human
- secrets, my fleshly worries, unending.
- Pig Woman has it good—2-D
- and unconscious—what I wouldn’t give:
- my twisted teeth, my regrets, my body
- bent on death. House me in a beastly
- form, let me feel the animal joy of a molding ear
- of corn between my jaws/still, for good,
- my spoiling. Goodbye to this upright skeleton,
- to its coarsening and its pains. I’ll be an acrylic smear,
- encased within a white pine frame.
© Lauren Winchester. Cream City Review, Volume 45, Number 1, Spring & Summer 2021. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Department of English. https://uwm.edu/creamcityreview/
About the Poet:
Lauren Winchester, United States, (b. 1991), is a poet based in San Carlos, California. Her poems explore humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Winchester’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Cream City Review, Notre Dame Review, Passages North, THRUSH, TYPO, BOAAT and elsewhere.
She has been awarded artist in residency fellowships by the Edward Albee Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Winchester received her MFA in poetry from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught creative writing and served as assistant editor of The Hopkins Review. [DES-01/22]
Additional information:
- Lauren Winchester @ https://laurenwinchester.com/
- Metallic Leaps, or the Pleasures of Listening