Woman Loving & Loving Woman

By Serena Ferrari

Serena Ferrari grew up in upstate New York writing poetry and short stories in her free time, before receiving a film degree from New York University. She returned to her first love of creative writing as well as her home upstate, where the two constantly inform each other.

These sister poems discuss the sensation of loving. The first part in regards to women opening themselves up to loving men honestly and kindly. The second poem recounts a moment of solitude where one finds love in nature and thus in self. Together the poems outline an epiphany of how women love men in the same fashion that they love themselves: consciously.

Illustration by Helena Goddard

Woman Loving

She was blind to her capacity

To love fearlessly, until one morning,

She felt him sleeping on another moon,

And rise in the afternoon with a heavy indifference to her

Still very very sore from the acted play of the night before.

That’s when she recognized the schismatic nature of her love,

And how he only deserved the good kind, which she would feel in return.

It was that simple. A simple transaction:

Nothing lost from an equal bargain,

A woman can love a man and lose nothing.

Loving Woman

The first time was an accident,

time evaded, the light of the day dimming

just as she had set off.  

It was colder than the past few days,

felt the puncture of each inhale,

The sun, threatening to glow a soft yellow

Even the sad, mediocre houses with American flags looked like nurturing mothers.

She looked through the windows, mirrors,

and saw families sitting down for thanksgiving dinner.

Everyone operating on the same clock.

It was on her way back that she was confronted by the explosion.

The splitting embers of the sun cut through the oncoming darkness,

like a hope worth believing in.  

She stood there for a while staring into heaven

It was as if the sun was planning to secretly run away from the world

and had only told her.

She felt honored,

like a man in the presence of a woman quietly undressing.

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