Colleen S. Harris
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA from Spalding University. Her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback 2019, Bellowing Ark, 2011), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, forthcoming 2025), Some Assembly Required (Porkbelly, 2014), and That Reckless Sound (Porkbelly, 2014). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Cider Press Review, Appalachian Heritage, and more than 70 others. Find her at colleensharris.com and as ‘warmaiden’ on Bluesky/Instagram.
The Friendship of Older Women
for Robin
We are not the girls we were. We did not know
each other as girls, but we recognized each other
as women, always a few months of ruined savings
from you touring me through Montmartre,
from me dragging you to the Fontana di Trevi
to gape at Poseidon and throw in our coins.
You send a photo of yourself in good lighting
before your tall bronze mirror in a delicate lace bra,
pants three sizes smaller than last year, snow
in drifts beyond your window, a dreary Buffalo spring.
You ask how they look (and because we are women,
I know you mean the slacks and not your breasts).
I don’t compliment you, yet. We are so much older
than we were, after all, and there are so many more
reasons to be thin, few of them good. I worry
we will not make it to France. Before I say
that this olive wide-leg twill fits against you
as though it knows you ache to believe yourself
a beauty, before I say clothes touching your body
so snugly is a language you will learn
like the 18th century French you read, so familiar
yet distant, too, before I can tell you how you look
in this new body, sister, mia sorella di cuore,
m’âme soeur, please tell me how you feel.
