Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 66 pp.
$14.95 plus s&h
2008, ISBN 978-0932412-676

Intimate, tender, at times funny and at others erotically charged, Porter’s poems dwell on the subjects that affect us deeply: relationships complicated by circumstance; childbirth; illness; unseasonable death. She reminds us that it is in the everyday entaglements that we find poetry.

The Mum Bell
by Cati Porter

Eight months, and I can hardly
breathe, waiting for it to drop.
My almost-three-year-old son wonders
what this is all about:

          a ball that is bound to flesh,
          a globe that does not spin,
          an inverted bowl with potential
          to knock one down.

He tells me there is a snake that slithers
my spined tree. It coils, spring
stretched taut to near breaking—threatening
to take me back to animal, to Eve?

          He extends one finger tentatively,
          traces the snake along my spine,
          and I stand straight, aware of the pressure
          of a small finger’s tip.

When I turn to face him, his small hands
cup the round of my belly. Baby humps up
to the press and I feel all of creation
squirming, the mum bell cupping primal

          ringing, ringing….

Cati Porter is founder and editor-in-chief of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry (www.poemeleon.org) and associate editor (poetry) for Babel Fruit (www.babelfruit.org), and is the author of a chapbook of prose poems, small fruit songs (Pudding House Publications, 2008).