Issue > Poetry
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor, is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. She is the winner of Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes and a Leeway Poetry Grant, and has co-authored two books: Teachers Act Up!: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre and Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice.

Feminine Ending

In prosody, a line of verse having an unstressed
and usually extrametrical syllable at its end.
I think of Debra Winger carried off
the factory floor, muscle and brawn of desire,
workmates in catty backrooms, their hair
netted, one tsk-tsk's another, scoffs
at overbaked cookies, the treachery
of a mother painting her son's toenails pink.
Then think of the Spanish for hand, la mano, link
between macha article and fist, the very
grasp of it, bedrail moan, dramatic heart
monitors, anguish of what promises to end:
beast that burdens bladder, exhale knife
thrust and burn or barter your blood, start
the push! Again and again until the end
that never ends: mid and her suffix, wife.

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