Sherry Chandler

She had a lover whose eyes were black hooks,
luring her heart into the marsh of his body—
then dragging her out like a stained prize,
a captive of his scars, his mother’s blood.

She wintered on berries and thin plums,
drank a broth of maples and spruce,
strung nets to snare the mice and snakes,
while her lover groaned and slept.

She had a lover whose fingers spun sticky webs,
who wove her nerves around his throat like pearls—
a necklace of fat spiders and grubs,
moth wings fluttering against his skin.

—Tiffany Midge, from The Woman Who Married A Bear

Tiffany Midge is Hunkpapa Sioux and German. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux. She is the recipient of the Diane Decorah Poetry Award from The Native Writers Circle of the Americas for Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press, 1996).

You can learn more about Tiffany at her blog A Girl Named Turquoise, where you’ll find pictures of her with some of the Affrilachian poets during a recent visit to read at Transylvania. [I am always behind the curve on these things so I missed this reading.] You can read a short collection of her poetry, The Woman Who Married A Bear, at The Other Voices International Project. More poetry and an mpg of Tiffany reading “The Woman Who Married A Bear” can be found at her page at the Storytellers Native American Authors Online

Ah, the Tasmanian Devil Errol Flynn —

so that’s where Dudley Dooright got his chin!

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Worth it for the fencing match with Basil Rathbone, and also for seeing J. Carrol Naish as a swarthy French pirate. But it was “The Sea Hawk” that was featured in “The Goonies.”