Happy 2nd birthday, Seven Skirts! It’s been a joy and honor to bring this debut poetry collection out in the world. Congratulations to author Jacki Rigoni! Rigoni, an educator and the City of Belmont’s Poet Laureate from 2018 to 2021, has recently been assigned to work as liaison to the San Mateo County Commission on the Status of Women, the Domestic Violence Council, and the Office of Arts and Culture, in her capacity as Senior Legislative Aide to The Honorable Noelia Corzo, the first Latina elected to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.
Seven Skirts, though steeped in the milieu of #metoo, divorce court, and the ubiquity of violence against women, “[celebrates] women breaking silence after abuse, reclaiming their history, helping each other, learning to let go,” writes Dr. Luisa A. Igloria, Poet Laureate Emerita of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Author and publisher Tayve Neese has called it, “a collection rooted in healing.”
From Seven Skirts, page 20. "Leaving" I locked the door on Danger each night until I found him lying next to me, looking exactly like Love. Day forged black to gray to flame until everything blazed. Dust illuminated like fairies. Daffodils in the yard sprang from clay. The man still slept, golden and harmless, his fuzzy brown sweater slumped on a chair. How many numb nights I tugged his cable-knit tighter around me, when all along I could have shrugged it to the floor for the orange cat to nap on and shivered until morning. But I didn’t see what I couldn’t see. That’ll take some self-forgiveness. Dawn crept in when it did, one minute earlier than yesterday. That was the only difference. Now I walk with bare arms into the buckeye-leafed spring, where white flowers birth cherries, where morning clears her crow throat.
PALOMA PRESS 