Roseanna Boswell
SUDDENLY, WOMEN
I didn’t know I loved women till I found them in my poems and they were all body and soul and left no room for my insecurity the way boys always seem to when we hold hands and I think that they’re thinking about somebody else who does this better than me, and longer than me, and fits impossibly smaller spaces than me, where they like me and I don’t. I didn’t know I loved women till one day she was there behind my eyelids and I thought here we are, here we go, she’s come home, this body could fit my body like hillsides love snow. I didn’t know I was allowed to say both, or neither, or all. I didn’t know about space with walls that weren’t straight until I opened this door and here she was: hillside snow, open eyes, poem’s close.
Bio: Roseanna Boswell is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She has had both prose and poetry published in North Country Literary Magazine. Her writing focuses primarily on the voices of girls and women and seeks to explore and interrogate traditional notions of femininity as related to gender, sexuality, and body image.
Roseanna opens the door to her heart and mind and lets us come in and share something that is at the same time intimate and universal. Really lovely.