Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

Read

Winter 2014 |

Circles and Breasts

“A fertility signal, a youth signal, a health signal, a wealth symbol.”
A gland and a store of fat.

“Mama” or, “¡Oye mamita!” if looking for a steamy date.
Preferably with real tissue.

For myself, though born in the Fifties: pillow and/or punishment.
For myself, against the cliché of gravity

as I strip down for the unstoppable mirror.
For the Amazon, cutting off the right side

in order to shoot her arrow
                                      straight into the adversary.

Note

        Quoted portions are from Natalie Angier’s article “The Circular Logic of the Universe,” New York Times, December 8, 2009.

Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection of poetry Foreign Bodies will be out in 2020. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, Queens College, City University of New York.