Blackbird Archive
← v8n1, Spring 2009
Poetry · Volume 8, Number 1

Meaning To Milk

Rita Mae Reese

From the Sanskrit duh,

           the world gets a stream

of daughters, daughters

           begetting daughters.

From hungry newborns

           opening our mouths

to the sincere milk

           of words, to Jael

with milk and spike for

           the fleeing Canaanite

(whose voice made the walls

           shake and wild animals

fall dead), to young maids

           pulling and pulling

the white streams into

the pails of morning

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Rita Mae Reese

Rita Mae Reese’s work has appeared in New England Review , Memorious , Bloom , The Nation , The Southern Review , and Prairie Schooner , among other journals. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for poetry and fiction, a Discovery/ The Nation award for poetry, and a Stegner Fellowship in fiction from Stanford University. Reese is currently the Marsh McCall Lecturer at Stanford and lives in San Francisco. Photo by Shelley Eades