Michelle Hoeckel-Neal
I Am From & I Am For
I am from
the womb of Women.
From a shadowed cocoon
where the whispered songs of
my mother echo,
propel me toward light.
I am one
of three generations of women teachers:
a lineage of lovers.
Women who showed me how to nurture
how to nourish
how to hurt and how to heal.
Women who write –
their words etched into glass ceilings
their voices shattering
the misogynist systems that exist to
silence us.
Women who sacrificed
almost everything:
Her voice, Her body, Her love.
Replaced these with poison – of the bottle, of men,
drowned in it only to be wrenched to the surface
by the hands of the Women
whose blood ran through her poisoned veins.
I am a Village of voices.
Together we sing, empowered,
Inspired and in motion:
to traverse mountains
to make homes
to shape minds
to forgive
to forge new paths
through lands that wish us gone.
We are not heroines.
We are flawed and scarred and selfish.
We are stifled by darkness and lightning –
storms which flood our minds, our bodies.
And we are resilient.
We live not because we wish it,
but because we owe it:
to ourselves, to our histories,
to our children.
I am Woman.
I am from Women.
I am for Women, of Women.
I am a galaxy of cells
Woven in blood, in story, in soul.
I am from and I am for .
Michelle Hoeckel-Neal is a graduate English student at the University of Maine concentrating in creative writing. Michelle enjoys writing flash fiction, poetry, and short stories that transport readers down bizarre paths and into unexpected spaces. She also loves serving as a teaching assistant with the University’s college composition program and as an editor for SPIRE, an interdisciplinary journal of conservation and sustainability. You can find her on Twitter @MHN_Hello.