#18: The One Blue Thread, by Naomi F. Chase
About the Author
Naomi Feigelson Chase is the author of three books of poetry, The Judge's Daughter, Listening for Water, and Waiting for the Messiah in Somerville, Mass., a chapbook, Stacked (illustrated by Jon Agree), as well as A Child is Being Beaten, and The Underground Revolution: Hippies, Yippies, and Others. Many of her short stories have been anthologized. An unpublished novel won the 1996 Hackney Literary Award for fiction. She reported for The Village Voice and has written pieces for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
About the Chapbook
"In The One Blue Thread, Naomi Chase gives us Gittle, a character so lively, so rambunctious, so splendid in her reasoning, the poems in this chapbook also read as a novel-in-verse. Chase's on-target wit and verbal agility do more than challenge religious iconography. These poems transform a tender and vulnerable human emotion and lift them into the political. A completely engaging series of poems!" —Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems
"I read Naomi Chase's works. I listen to her reading. Always her words pierce me and cause me to see and hear. Now I have her latest. Like her Gittel, I roll onto my back to see how a voice looks." —Jimmy Breslin, columnist, Newsday
From the Chapbook
How a Voice Looks
She hears it just before sleep.
The doll who cries Mama is gone.
Gittel kneels, searches under the bed,
rolls onto her back to see how a voice looks.
The voice asks:
What did you see?
"Soot from the world's corners,
metal from earth's core,
sweating like Jews in Egypt."
The voice says:
I am the thumb your doll sucks,
the itch between your thighs."And I'm a fool to listen while a devil speaks of thighs."
I like your impudence.
You are mine,
still to be written.
"Who wants a fool to serve them?"
I Am What I Am.
