These poems bear words in Lushootseed, a language of the Coast Salish peoples.
Downstream: 1) Anne Enright: “Pregnancy was an erasure of the self. A person was turned by impregnation into both miracle and meat.” 2) Robin Wall Kimmerer: “Mothering is a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.” 3) Virginia Woolf. Upstream: 4) Clarice Lispector: “I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.” 5) Rainier Maria Rilke. 6) Louise Glück. 7) Bashō: “The journey itself is my home.”
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Gabriela Denise Frank is an American literary artist, editor, educator, and winner of the inaugural Fern Academy Prize. Her work appears in BOMB Magazine, True Story, Epoch, DIAGRAM, Northwest Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of the forthcoming collection “How to Not Become the Breaking” (Gateway Literary Press, 2025), she serves as creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com
