How to Survive a Shipwreck, and: In My Mother’s House

Abstract

How to Survive a Shipwreck, and: In My Mother’s House Kristina Bicher (bio) How to Survive a Shipwreck Pamela Sue, preparation is everything! The crimson miracleOf those crushed velvet hot pants, waiting beneath your skirt.Scamper up that tree in satin heels, before the glass walls give and the inverted world fills and fills with cries and cold brine.Every girl learns hotness is the hook but helpless is the reel.I’m nothing, Gene Hackman, without you … don’t go!Dowdy Shelley will die in granny panties; the hooker must burn.O, Virgins of 72! Are you waiting to be found? Put down your fruit glosses and curling wands, pick up that pipe wrench,Now pound. The steel here’s only one-inch thick. [End Page 245] In My Mother’s House O crisping of cloth! O steamy sighs of irons! Dear Mother, I cannot work your loom. My fingers only tear at the tissue of dreams. [End Page 246] Kristina Bicher Kristina Bicher’s chapbook, Just Now Alive, was published by Finishing Line Press in its New Women’s Voices Series in 2014. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Crab Creek Review, the Louisville Review, and others. She received a BA from Harvard University, an MA from Manhattanville College, and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Copyright © 2015 Kristina Bicher