sylvia

sylvia plath

today is the 50th death anniversary of sylvia plath.

i can see why she picked february.

i hate that she was left alone, sick and depressed, with two babies and no support.

"morning poem" has been a go-to poem for me for so many years.  i love its metric beauty, that "fat, gold watch" and the way she beautifully and hauntingly describes maternal alienation.

i'd call her a pioneer for this, and maybe she'd have outlasted the hard parts if someone had described how hard and confusing and devastating it can be:

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

Morning Song


Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

r.i.p., ms. plath------------>>>

last warm pair--a give away!

in celebration of making it through thirty-one days of posts on our new blog, girls in tight places are holding a tights give away.  make a comment in our comments section by midnight of january 30,  and we will randomly select a winner on january 31st of two thousand and twelve.

shortly thereafter, the lucky reader will receive in the mail the fabulous falke "sign" tight in "cosmic," made of  polyamide and elastane, pictured above.


lara says:

when i was at the end of my pregnancies, i always caved and bought a new outfit.  i had become more enormous than i could have possibly imagined at the beginning of the pregnancy, and i was sick to death of all the clothes i'd been wearing.  i figured it was worth the price of a new outfit that wouldn't be worn very much in order to preserve my mental health through the looooong final 5 weeks or so.


buying winter clothes in january is a little like buying maternity clothes in week 35.  logically, you know you should save your money for new spring dresses, and buying winter clothes just isn't that appealing at this point in the year.  so you don't buy.  then you get up one freezing morning in february cursing the same tired old choices you've been making all winter.  you really don't want to get dressed.  you really don't think you can stand your pilly old tights one more day.  but by then it's definitely too late to buy more winter clothes.

well, girls in tight places want to help you out with this.  we're giving away the last warm pair of tights you will need for the season just for leaving a comment in the comments section.  girls in tight places want their readers to:  1) have a drawerful of cute tights, 2) have something to look forward to, and 3) have pretty things to wear, do, read, and think about every day.

girls in tight places also want to celebrate our one month anniversary.

we hope to make you and your legs happy until you start to glimmer & spring.

julie says:


You can keep your tights in a drawer.  You can keep your tights in a cardboard box like I did in graduate school.  You can hand wash your tights and sling them over a shower rod like Marsha Mason in The Goodbye Girl (were those tights?).  In graduate school, I had a pair that looked like a Kandinsky painting on caffeine.  In San Francisco, I had a leopard skin print pair that looked like the manager of a local rock club's leg tattoo.  My black-and-white striped pair are like Proust's madeleine--I wore them to work through the latter half of a bleak winter under a pair of cut-off shorts and combat boots.  My co-workers, boys with Faith No More hair, called me "crazy legs," which I loved, but pretended to hate.  I've put my finger through a pair of spiderweb tights on first wearing.  It's time to create some new tights' memories--some tights memories you can share with us!  It's time to get yourself through a lot more frigid winter weeks.  It's time to win the best and last warm pair of tights we can offer.