I Learned Irony in Order
Rent from DeepDyve- I Learned Irony in Order
For Ignatia Broker
Our way of life is changing, and there is much we must accept. But let it be only the good. And we must always remember the old ways. We must pass them onto our children and grandchildren so they too will recognize the good in the new ways.
From Night Flying Woman
I am a woman of mirrors the full-length on the back of a bathroom door. Yesterday, I see her again silver hair, brittle legs, stockings. Tomorrow at the university I teach about "story cycles" and "multiple narrators"
And I will wonder: How many angles does one reflection make?
Young sisters jumping in heaps of leaves see themselves for the first time in pieces.
The fall I learned to collect leaves I'd place them between paper transfer their veins through green crayon [End Page 123] like the ones in my hands thin and busy the only part of me I'd study.
My mother would sit me on the rock comb through my wet hair weave two braids on either side so the next day my hair would have waves all the while my hands going over and over the tracings of a leaf.
Daughters, remember your fullness.
Molly McGlennen is mixed-blood (Anishinaabe, French, Irish), born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is presently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American Studies at Vassar College; in fall 2008, she will begin her position as Assistant Professor of English at Vassar. She received her PhD in Native American studies from University of California, Davis, in 2005, with her dissertation work on contemporary indigenous women’s poetry. She also earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in 1998. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Frontiers, Shenandoah, and Atlantis and in the anthology Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing.
