Stella Reed

Contest - 3rd Place

Stella Reed is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water, 2019, 3: A Taos Press along with Tina Carlson and Katherine DiBella Seluja. She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami, judged by Emilia Phillips. Stella teaches poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. You can find her work in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, SWWIM, anthologized in They Said, Black Lawrence Press, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from New England College.

Because I was a lamb

my father loved me like a sacrifice so I have loved 
like a distant cloud, or emerging sun, like a fox with its tail on fire I’ve run from the towns and burned down the fields that would feed me. Once when I thought of innocence I drew a picture of myself as I was before my father named me for his wife. Small and white 
on a background blue as his sheets with their military creases. The pillows were distant clouds unlike my mother’s hair unlike her teeth, those porcelain bells, his fist making the clapper swing. 
 And how do the clouds ring 
the tops of the mountains like that silent in their chime, filled 
from beneath with fire.

“ Catholicism was the religion I was raised with, so in attempting to write about domestic violence, I chose to look at biblical mythology for imagery and metaphor, specifically instances of animals being sacrificed or harmed. Their innocence is the reason for their demise, their agency never taken into account. In the story of Samson and Delilah, Samson binds pairs of foxes together, lights their tails on fire and releases them into the fields of those he wants revenge against. Toxic masculinity at its finest. The first line came and the rest flowed from that. ”

Listen: