And still she sits, young while the earth is old – ‘Body’s Beauty’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The first wife of Adam in Jewish and Mesopotamian mythology, Lilith – created equal, not from the rib but the very same clay – was banished from Paradise for refusing to obey him, replaced, and largely left behind in the story telling, becoming, effectively apocryphal. She has been characterised as demonic, hazardously seductive, horrifyingly bestial, destroyer of men, a threat to children. Across folklores, her image blurs with serpentine Lamias, feathered sirens, murderous mother figures, witches, vampires, spiders.
The original femme fatale, the monstrous feminine with dangerous hair, Lilith might be embraced as a feminist symbol. More than that, she might be seen to represent the silencing and demonisation of the past – the many pasts – that threaten how we think of ourselves now, those we think we can run from, even the dehumanisation of those who resist oppression. Lilith is a question mark that haunts our ideals – equality, memory, family, freedom, order, safety, women, belief, silence, and monstrosity. She is abjection, rage, doubleness, shadow, the notion of destruction at the root of creation, and a fierce protest against forgetting.
Abridged is looking for poetry and/or art on exclusion, vengeance, memory and forgetting, monstrosity, resistance and freedom. You may submit up to three poems to abridged@ymail.com which must be in a Word or PDF format. Unusually formatted poems we prefer in an PDF format, material that is more straightforward in Word. Art should be 300dpi or above and in jpeg or similar format. Please note this issue will be A5 portrait-sized/shaped. Please also send a short bio and put your name and address on the email or it might get lost in the Spam folder. We can’t send proofs so please send the final version of your poem. The deadline for submissions is the 30th March 2025.
This issue is funded by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Abridged is funded by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and The Arts Council of Ireland.
