Please help me welcome Stephanie L. Harper to formidableWoman!  Though her work is experimental in format and form, its voice is ancient and familiar.  In the enigmatic lines of Risen:

…a body/amassed/of untold merges & drifts/ yes/a birth-less-ness/a molten torpor/yet dispossessed/of breath…

Ms. Harper’s lines define femininity, aligning burial, birth, & becoming, creating in us at once a sense of relief and of grief at finding ourselves here.  Read Ms. Harper’s poem in its entirety here:  Risen

In her poem, Instead, the poet invites us into her living room, into her kitchen, into her writing studio where

…meaning always slips drily away from the words/& escapes like sly prey into the woods      because/the words bravely give chase/but they were never cut out for this hunt/& they get lost     & hungry…

We meet the family dog:  harbinger of unrest, clicking out the hunger everyone feels, especially the poet herself..

…it was too late to start cooking dinner/& the cattle dog     who lives for order/requires order      & feels its lack/like her hackles feel static…

Read Ms. Harper’s poem in its entirety here:  Instead

Stephanie L. Harper is a Pushcart Prize Nominee, and the author of the chapbook, *This Being Done* (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poems appear in Slippery Elm, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Figroot, Harbinger Asylum, The Ibis Head Review, Panoply, and elsewhere. She lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with her husband, two teen children, and a cattle dog named Sydney.   Order a copy of This Being Done here .

To enjoy more of Ms. Harper’s work, visit her online here.

image credit #1:  moon used with permission of the artist, John Flannery via CC.  Some rights reserved. 

image credit #2:  up close with boy used with permission of the artist, Corrie Barklimore via. CC.  Some rights reserved.