Tara Channtelle Hill | Sleepwalking | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Tara Channtelle Hill is a mother, a poet, and graduate from Northern Michigan University. She has been published in MadHat Lit, Emerge, Amethyst Arsenic, Virgogray Press — and featured in Carcinogenic Poetry's "Top 10 Most Read" list. Tara lives in Marquette, Michigan, and wishes she were married to Richard Hugo (if he were alive) or someone like him.

Also by Tara Channtelle Hill: Two Poems Churches and Kickstands

June 2017

Tara Channtelle Hill

Sleepwalking

She played with worms but liked herself best with indigo lids. Once, a lotus flower took her, so she walked naked in the rain. Maybe it was a dream. A lotus flower is an entirely different thing than a water lily. An entirely different thing. She breathes and leaves, breathes and leaves. Cloying white or hot pink petals sodden in virtue, like sexual purity and non-attachment. Her seeds never die. Her navel issues Brahma. And neither god nor man is self-born. Neither god nor man. A smart woman said to forget. Forget herself and go. She was born from mud. Razed from the gallows. It was terror in the garden. A pomegranate raised her from dead.

Sometimes I write in third person so I can be more present in an experience rather than my ego. Or maybe it's the other way around, it allows me to say whatever I want. "Sleepwalking" is an odyssey of my own sexuality, body, and femininity, in parallel with nature and religions — some of which I find liberating and powerful and some of which are suffocating. Near the end, I draw reference to the terrors women endured and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I'd hated to have been her, be her. I mean, who wants to just lie beneath a man. It's so much fun on top. And you can't have one of us without the other. I love women and I really love men. I'm just trying to re-direct my history, make human connections, and accept myself along the way.

< Previous (Larisa Svirsky)Next (Jenn Strife Gibbs) >