“Changing Perspectives” © Sally Brown

 

My Ex-Boyfriend Wants You to Hate Me

and make misogyny as contagious
as an online autumn storm battering
sapling trees until they are furious
enough to let cold rain eat them – shedding
paling leaves like the photographs he’d share
if he owed them – to shame me with my own
nakedness – allowing the world to stare
as he buries me in expletives sown
and multiplying in the soil you throw
filling my holes, my hollows and my name’s
dissolving canopy in earth’s damp, slow
reclamation of flesh – it is the same
algebra that makes kissing betrayal
and love a pornography – dead for all.

 

Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats.

Sally Brown is an artist, curator and writer currently based in Morgantown. Her artwork including drawing, painting and performance, explores womanhood, motherhood and the body. She has exhibited her work in spaces nationally and in the UK. She has won two awards for illustration for Intimates and Fools and Leaves of Absence, both with poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman. She has participated in artist residencies with Stay Home Gallery in TN and Rhoneymeade Sculpture Center in PA; and will be participating in the internationally renowned artist residency, Proyecto Ace, in Buenos Aires, May 2023. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, Women’s Art Journal and Artslant, among others. She has curated group shows in Omaha, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Morgantown and Lubbock, TX. She holds a Bachelor of Arts-Studio Art, a Master of Public Administration and Master of Arts- Art History and Feminist Theory. She is a former member of the College Art Association National Committee on Women in the Arts, edited the online journal Les Femmes Folles, and currently serves as Exhibits Coordinator for West Virginia University Libraries.