Toni Thomas' poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poetry East, and in other magazines, and in the Southern California Poetry Anthology as part of the 2005 Ann Stanford Poetry Award.

The Feral Issue

ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010

The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.

Read this Issue

Published Winter/Spring 2009

My Mother's Body Turns Traitor on Her

by Toni Thomas | ns 71-72

My Mother's Body Turns Traitor on Her
til she doesn’t recognize herself anymore
curtains the bathroom mirror
scissors herself out of family photograph albums.
What will she do with the remainder
of her life now that the
hourglass of curves have turned
into grapefruits of discontent?
Some might say she has
fudge marbled her life away
given into dissolution, wrinkles
lacks self-respect.

How can I tell you about loss
the way it eats heathen street shoes
the way loneliness dwarfs the tongue
and courage can be a secret pact that keeps
a family stick pinned together
on heavy knees
the way time sometimes slays the voice
sets up a graveyard we start
to live in.

Over time my mother's body turned
traitor on her.
It was my childhood.
A sadness I watched with a rapt tongue.
But in the sum of a life
there are more terrible
irrevocable losses
than this one.

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.