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Welcome
SOTP is a place where we promote female writers, artists, and photographers. This is our goal and our emphasis however, from time to time, we will open the page to everyone in order to showcase some of their works.
Please feel free to click on our archive for past works. It is located at the bottom of each page. If you have comments, please post them under the artist's work, General comments may be directed to the editor at midulcevida66@gmail.com.
Abusive and deragatory comments will not be tolerated and will be immediately removed.
We hope you enjoy your visit. Thanks for stopping by.
Juliana Vargas
Editor-Sisters of the Page
Sunday, September 30, 2007
wal-mart frightens the fuck outta me by misti rainwater-lites
with its
shiny floors
dead eyed stockers
lackluster produce
christian propaganda
kitten calendars
zombie shoppers
coming toward me
with their carts full
of squalling kids
and cases of generic soda
this is hell
whatever happens when I die
will be heaven
by comparison
Misti has two brand-new chapbooks at lulu.com, Sought and Don't Be Deterred By My Deterioration. Halloween/Samhain/Dia de los Muertos are Misti's favorite holidays. Her favorite candy is Reeses pumpkins.
two by melissa hansen
The wild god
The wild god hangs with the goats
Because he is in you
I want him in me
Because he can see you
I want him
to see me
I smell him from a distance
my nose
it does not twitch
The wild god hangs with the goats
I am selfish
I want god to dig into me
to bury me
I cry with desire
I burn my skin with fire
My pilgrim lust
I give to one
my bloody
heart
beats
ripe
like sun
The wild god hangs with the goats
I want him
And I think he wants me too
Cold Eve
The fog brews lovingly.
Inches away
the dawn is forced to recede.
Further and further
it lays.
Swept into the night
with nature's black broomed whores
who swallow lovingly.
Melissa Hansen lives in San Francisco where she writes stories and poetry that enjoy lying in swollen notebooks while hiding in dark drawers. Her poetry has been published by Leaf Press, Silenced Press, The Smoking Poet, and The Guild of Outsider Writers. You can contact her here:
www.myspace.com/quicksecret
the lesson-a short story by km sutton
Darkness falls over the rural country road. The old dirt road started its life as a footpath. Progress had made it necessary for a road to be built there, in order to construct a sprawling estate for the software media mogul. He used his estate to escape the modern world he helped to facilitate. The gates of his estate were a mere mile from this dark spot. A car with its lights off was making its way slowly along the road. The woman in the car knew, like everyone else in the small town knew, he was at some big conference in New York. He was there to help reassure the country that 9/11 hadn’t crippled the economy. The town was proud of this patriotic son and his connection to their little community. She didn’t care about that. All she cared about was that this was a remote location and she needed time for this final act of intimacy with the man who was her husband.
She pulled to the side of the road and came to a stop. She’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes on the way. She opened the trunk and pulled on a pair of gloves and lifted out the old wheelchair. She’d paid cash for it a month ago at a medical supply store in Kirby. She’d drove the two-hour round trip when he thought she was visiting her mother at the hospital. If his corpse weren’t rotting in the car he would have beaten her after seeing the odometer mileage didn’t match up. He’d been on top of her from the moment her father gave her to him. People didn’t believe that kind of thing still happened in this country. He’d given her father fifty thousand cash for her hand. The wedding was a farce. Everyone, including the parish priest knew her shame. She would have died at her father’s hands had she refused.
She dragged the body into the wheelchair. Pushing him into the woods she remembered all the beatings and the torturous rapes. He’d wanted her to get pregnant. She’d managed to prevent it with a screwdriver and Jim Beam for anesthetic. He’d removed every screwdriver from the house after finding her with last one. She was properly punished that night. He gave her a sponge bath with bleach. He said to wash the sin of killing their child off her. She saw the murder of her possible children as a mercy killing, which she preferred, rather than subject their innocent souls to her same miserable fate.
After about a mile of pushing, the terrain became too much for the wheelchair and she had to drag the body another mile and a half before she was satisfied. She returned the way she’d come and collected the wheelchair. She packed it back into the car and drove back toward the small town, and then through it.
km sutton is an african american lesbian living in the lap of luxury (so she says) in the middle of nowhere. she has been a closeted writer for many years. welcome to her coming out party!!
locks of hair by zoe alexandra
I keep having to remind myself
that they are just feelings
that you have them too
even though you can slip yours behind
your long black hair and forget
My hair is short and I cannot tuck secrets
Into the lining of my jacket
If my face is your compass then
You are moving in the wrong direction
I believe in your eyelashes
The soft flutter of one against the other
The way you look at me
But I bet you look at everybody that way
Your hair is electric
Your eyes are smoldering through
My tightly wound string of my confidence
You are the seeing the actual me
You are seeing the authentic me
And I bet you want to wash your hands of it.
Last night I drove through the darkness
Through New Rochelle and New Haven
All the lamplights on the highway looked like constellations
Telling me to run the fuck away
The night before
We were flying down the Boston Turnpike
All the way to Vermont
With my best friend,
I am finally safe
I can finally spill the alphabet soup
Acrid red from my dirty mouth
Not afraid to be unlovable anymore
(if i am then…so what…)
You're from Tempe, Arizona
Where my best friend used to cook up batches of acid
And crack
And heroin
And that's how I know you had to come back
To Connecticut where they loaded you up with
Thorazine and methadone
And you crawled around in some dimly lit basement
And played with bugs.
I only loved you because you were so far from my grasp
I only loved you because I could never touch you
You were magical and I was on a pink cloud
My first week crying
Your hair was above water
Somehow your eyes were still clear pools
Like crystal balls
Like Russian roulette I knew that you'd die
Or I'd die
but I'd never get to sink my fingers into your back
Hold you correctly
And then I did
Felt you there beneath me
Thought I was sinking
Thought if I had you
I wouldn't want you anymore
Your fingers up my cunt
Your crooked fingers in my mouth
Biting down hard
Trying to be quiet
Trying to move like some starlet
From the pages of a glossy magazine
Trying to let you catch me
In all the right lights.
But we're just friends now
We're just friends like you said
And I had to etch it into my hemisphere
Because yours is warmer
Yours is closer to the equator
And I'm out of sunscreen
And I'm feeling lost on this desert landscape
Everything is as barren as my mother's womb
Everything is drying up
My skin is peeling
My lips aren't flower petals anymore.
I won't tell anyone about this
I won't tell anyone except:
God and Jesus and Mary Magdalene
And my best-friend and that girl from Ferry St. that I used to know.
I live my life for a live wire
I lay myself on the telephone line
I wait for you to pick up the receiver
And if you don't I sob into my flannel sheets
It is this tiny inferno that keeps building inside me
It's this little flame
That won't let me fall to ashes
It's you looking at me
Then looking away
Begging me to turn back around
To see if your eyes widen
If a stare like yours could ever burn through mine.
Made in secret
See you tomorrow
Made in secret
See you later
Made in secret
See you Friday
Made in secret
See you whenever
I wish you hadn't made it real,
This poem would be propaganda
If this was 1937 it would be confiscated
By someone in a blue suit
I'd be wearing your red letter
I'd be crying in kitten heels
I'd be cuffed and thrown against a fencepost
I'd think it was all really romantic.
If all feelings are trivial
Than so are yours
If you have any.
I don't play those sick games anymore;
Come here, A little closer, Come here
Get the fuck away from me
Everyone's bleeding
Everyone's bleeding from their lips
And nose and eyes
Everyone's bleeding from their aorta
And their fibroids and their bowels
Just not everyone can see it
But I can feel it
It's internal
I'm taking a turn for the worst.
If you loved my mouth then you'd know
I could tell you things no one else could
Sick things that would make your ears ring for days
You could brainwash me and make me proper
I'd wear whatever you wanted
I'd wear your black eye
I'd wear nothing at all
The truth is I just want your hair
As symbolic as it may sound
Once I wanted to dye and cut and maim
My hair and my mom said it was psychosis
I think I just want your hair
To wrap around me to tie to trees
To inhale deeply
To exhale like a drag from a menthol cigarette
When you say you're quitting smoking
I think it's a trick
I think you're quitting me
I think I've lost my sheen
I think I'm not that nice-looking girl anymore
I think I need you all over again.
I am a twenty-three year old female from Queens, NY whose work has been published in Zygote In My Coffee, Silenced Press, Madswirl.com, Hipsterotica, Deconstruction Quarterly, The Common-Line Project, Best Lesbian Erotica 2007 (cleis press) and will appear in the future Zygote in My Coffee zine print edition of December 2007 as well as in Remark Magazine, Debris Magazine, Word Riot and Pink Elephants on Review.
at the treatment center by judy l. brekke
her make-up
thick and overlapping layers
covers
beatings,
hatred,
mental illness
she walks carefully
silently on tip toes
afraid her face
will show
deep
dark secrets
her child-like babble
gives the appearance
of a lost toddler
searching for
a friend
who is not there
he shuffles
down a damp, musty
hallway dragging
a leg stiff as white marble
it collects fluted med
cups rainbow stained
black hair thick
as a horse's mane
slicked back into
pigtails that hang
over his torn brown plaid
jacket with pockets turned out
he passes rooms locked
to keep him in view
of female staff dressed
in odorous and stained
white shirts covering
bulging soft breasts
these keepers
of his must prevent
a second leap
from a broken
third floor window
he cut off
his testicles
with a soda can
pop top
a first day nurse
found him in the kitchen
putting a soft grey object
recently fried in his mouth
he rests
in his dark room
whimpers
"oh please help me"
his self mutilation
was only the beginning
with towels wedged between his legs
he cried softly wanting to be a woman
Born in and again resides in Minnesota with Stephen S. Morse (spent between 1969 and 1982 in the Bay Area). A co-editor of JUICE, (first as a print magazine now an e-zine). She has been writing since age 10 with some seriousness since 1974. Won the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Award in 1978 and 1979 with the poems sharing a place in the University of California (Berkeley) Archives. Wrote and illustrated a child's book of poetry in 1981- never submitted - it rests on her bookshelf. Now working on a book of poetry with Stephen S. Morse, 'Places that Linger', dedicated to their granddaughter.
She loves roasting marshmallows, watching fireflies, and experiencing life through the eyes and mind of her granddaughter Willow.
Published in: Debris Magazine, Instant Pussy, Mystery Island, Outsider Writers, Poetry Super Highway, Wilderness House Literary Review, Zygote in My Coffee, and others