Options for Penance | Hannah Dow

Hannah Dow is the author of Rosarium (forthcoming from Acre Books, 2018). She received her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, North American Review, Ninth Letter, and Cincinnati Review, among others. She reads poetry for Ploughsharesand is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. She lives in Southern California.  _____________   Eden I haven't yet learned to fold myselfinto something small and quiet enough to be desired—like an oyster's pearl, an origami bird—Eve's apple. Had the garden belonged to her, the world might be safe enough for a woman to roam alone without being picked clean of every good, soft thing inside her. Instead, she learns to harden around her body, to understand beauty as cruelty, that even a pearl is birthed from a body’s defense of its parasites.