Cindy Veach
Cindy Veach is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Monster Galaxy (MoonPath Press), a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award; Her Kind (CavanKerry Press), an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist; and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book “Must Read.” She is also the author of the chapbook Innocents (Nixes Mate Press) and co-author, with J. D. Scrimgeour, of the script Imprisoned! 1692 produced by the Essex National Heritage Commission. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize (selected by Mary Ruefle) and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize (selected by Marilyn Nelson), she is poetry co-editor of MER.
Cindy received an MFA from the University of Oregon where she was a graduate teaching fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. She has been a workshop instructor, a panelist at poetry festivals, and served as a reader and judge for poetry contests.
After living on Boston’s North Shore (Cape Ann) for thirty years, Cindy now resides in the Seattle area.
Learn more at https://www.cindyveach.com/
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Excerpt from Monster Galaxy
Aglaecwif
After Susan Rich
Outside my window men are repainting the crosswalk
putting new lines over old lines.
I learned a new word today, an Old English word—
aglaecwif—a monster-woman, troll-lady, wretch, hag.
Think, The Grand High Witch of All the World.
Think, Grendel’s no-name mother.
And then I learned that this word aglaecwif
is the feminine form of aglaeca: a hero,
a valiant warrior. Why am I not surprised? I know
these tropes: the monster mother, the sexless crone—
toothy, bald, clawed, toeless child-hater, child-eater.
If all witches are women as Roald Dahl wrote
then I claim that pedigree but explain why gender
makes me witch not warrior, hag not hero. What
patriarchal alchemy creates monsters out of what
I’m supposed to be versus what I am?
I have tried to be good, to exist between the lines
yet look at me, my galaxy of monsters.
