Category: Being Female

Labor Day

The boys have grown so hard this summer –

little apostles of violence screeching out of their driveways

in their bad cars.

The mamas are pleading up and down the block –

Don’t you leave.

Don’t you take that car.

Why do you do this?  Why?

And the answer is the same

for the mamas and the gods and the jackoff cutting them off

in traffic –

Fuck you, man, fuck you.

The boys have grown so hard this summer

watching the mtv boys whip the clothes off some bitch

until she’s only lips and tits and high heels,

stripped to cruel simplicity.

And I am afraid.

Proposals

 

Knowledge

I want to marry a machinist,

to stand on the lot at the plant

in my hard hat and visitor’s badge watching

while he slides the metal together,

measuring.

I’ll wear pink lipstick and a cotton dress

and bring baskets of warm cornbread

he can pass around.

For lunch we’ll sit

on upturned buckets side by side

and his coveralls with smudge my thigh.

When they whistle as I walk away

he will smile at his steel-toed boots,

knowing what he knows.

 

Invention

I want to marry a used car salesman.

We’ll make up stories

about the people who will drive away

in the Camaro or the Escort wagon

as we soap the windshields –

Real Honey, Runs Good, 1 Owner.

On Saturdays I’ll dress up in the bear suit

and wave to the people driving by

in their old beaters.

As we leave the lot every night

we’ll pick a different car,

depending on how we feel,

and drive into the Porsche-red sunset.

 

Travel

I want to marry a nomad,

feed him greasy meat

wrapped in flat bread

cooked on a hot rock.

I want to smell rain

and know when to put up the beasts.

I want to be sold for spices or camels.

When I come to my new husband

I want to spit and curse his eyes

before I dance.

 

Fall Romance

I want to marry a terrorist,

get grit in my khakis

while I squat to pack munitions,

a blush of gunpowder on my cheek.

When we rut

I want to be hardly there at all,

a crater burnt and sifted after.

 

Surely

For Dr. Shirley Martin
based on a true story

At the invitation of the Shah’s people she set out

for an adventure abroad taking

10 uniforms,

3 pair of good American shoes,

2 identical white cardigans,

and her mother,

who would find clean water, bargain for melons,

and train the help.

Square and blonde she moved briskly

through Labor and Delivery trying to discern

the structure of the system.

As women arrived, they chose empty beds

and quietly let her know when they were ready.

As the baby came, the nursery girl

would write the mother’s name

on its forehead with a grease pencil.

Several times a day the babies were brought

and mothers’ names called out.

If there were many Maras, the baby would be carried

from one to the next until the mother was found.

Some days she would visit the nursery

after her shift, brushing back babies’ black hair

with her small white fingers,

crooning their mothers’ names to them

in a language they would never speak.

Once, puzzled by clean faces

she asked the nursery girl:

Why no names on the babies by the heater?

The mothers had left.  They had too many.

Or too many girls.

They would stay warm here until the end.

Her own mother told her to bring them all home.

More realistic, she presented a plan to the Director.

Milk could be expressed, agencies involved.

Fingers making the church and the steeple,

he explained it was impossible.

She never visited the nursery again

but served her time efficiently,

telling herself over and over,

like a prayer sung out in the marketplace:

Surely this one

sliding into my hands

will be delivered.

On Picking a Man

for Amy

You’ll want to choose one with small flaws.

A painful past is good:

the memory of being overweight

or having been small enough to stuff into a locker;

a history of unfortunate eyewear,

bad skin, lack of coordination, or poor color sense;

maybe a job requiring a paper hat

to which he had to ride a bicycle with coaster brakes.

If there was success in class, it will have been in science.

If there were sports, there will have been a concluding injury.

If there were girls, they will have left him for politics, or

religion, or other girls.

Some current conditions will do:

recovering from alcoholism;

drying out from drug addiction;

suffering from a minor mental illness controllable by modern meds;

a child who won’t call;

an ex-wife who still shops with his mother;

and inability to keep his hair, or business, or waistline.

And most of all, you’ll want him older.

He’ll have memorized enough baseball stats

to be willing to abandon the game

for a Saturday afternoon.

No longer cocksure, he’ll have developed

a compensatory adroitness in loving,

more tender and reliable.

And when you are ready to unbutton yourself

you can leave the light on,

knowing he knows, as you do,

a soft spot or a bruise is a small price to pay

for the sweetness of ripe fruit.

Evening Shift

The laughter of working men

drifts into my back window.

At once I am 18, the girl from the office

taking a smoke break in a smear of fluorescent light

outside the hissing factory.

I want to be an artist in black

who has everything she needs,

but with sweat trickling down the small of my back

in this too-short polyester dress

it is easier to joke,

easier to pick the one with the wallet wife

and the key to his buddy’s place,

easier to give him the one thing

without seeming to want to,

easier to pretend I care a little

until I walk out to the cab at dawn

and don’t look back.

Men at the Laundry

Four men at the laundromat together,

uniform in white shirts and ties,

hair trimmed like lawns.

Moonies, maybe, or Mormons,

not hard enough for the service.

Their glasses reflect the sun.

Yes, i decide, Christians,

looking for a sanitary theology.

I am a happy beast before them.

With my blood-clotted cottons,

my flea bites, and sweat,

I claim this flesh

from which they fell,

and into which

at sunset

they slide like fish.

The Former Beauty

I. Ready

The former beauty turns a few graying heads

as she enters the bar.

Her skirt is tight and she’s still not wearing underwear

because her mother told

“always be ready for him.” And she is,

though her husband hasn’t touched her in months.

She waits,

folding her hair over and over

with her hand.

II. A Coup

The former beauty is tan again this summer,

blonder, and able to get into her thin jeans, too

At the veterinarian’s office

she sits with her golden retriever,

absently stroking his head and ears.

The young vet emerges to scan the waiting room.

His gaze pauses in her direction,

a dancer suspended at the apex of his leap, and moves on.

III. On the Street

A beautiful young man sits on the curb

outside the grocery.

The former beauty thinks for a moment

he might be a boy she dated a few times in college.

Oh, but that was more than twenty years ago;

this could be his son.

Unnoticed, she watches him from her car.

He is waiting for the girl

with the blue tattoo

carelessly pricked onto the flawless skin

of her left shoulder.

IV. Shopping

The former beauty keeps her eyes down as she pushes the cart

so no one knows she is moving her legs around a longing

she no longer believes she deserves.

No one knows she’s watching

snapshots of his wrist, his shirt sleeve rolled back,

exposing a scrape from something in his life,

about which she knows nothing,

and the other thing, so palpable, impossible.

She lowers herself onto him,

but even in her mind her body is ridiculous.

In produce a boy stacks bananas quickly.

The bruises will develop once she gets them home,

once they ripen.  This boy.  If she asked him

would he run?  Stare and breathe through his mouth

in disbelief?  Fear?  Would he smile?

She has no idea what is possible any more.

She picks up avocado, palming the wrinkled skin,

and eggplant, rubbing its smooth purple.

She holds an unwashed grape in her mouth.

Maybe she could ask someone.  Casually.

Ask someone about whom she cares nothing,

what is possible?  And read the answer

in his careful pauses.

V.  At the Reception

The former beauty is seated at the extra women’s table.

Silently

she slides her thumb under the heavy necklace of rose quartz,

lifts the beads to her lips,

and marvels at the warmth left from her breasts.

VI.  At the Mirror

The former beauty pulls at the sides of her face

and realizes she’ll never wear flowers in her hair again.

No longer possible, the fair Ophelia,

mad with love and beautiful in madness.

Now she is Ophelia dredged,

puffy and pale,

no longer in love.  Or mad.

VII.  In the Yard

In her fat nephew’s cast-off shorts and tee shirt

the former beauty weeds the front flower bed.

The cool breeze brushes the sun’s heat

from the back of her neck.

The sedum is the last thing in bloom.

She cuts her hand on a dry daylily leaf,

sucks the blood.

A car of teenage boys drives by.

They honk, yell something.

She waves with her injured hand,

assumes she must know them from somewhere,

and returns to the day’s work.

She Hopes She Is/She Prays She’s Not

She makes coffee,

drains the pot.

Feels sick.  A sign.  A sign?

She recalls the lip-biting grin,

the double nod,

imagines them quickened

to a piscean reality.

She turns her mind, willfully,

and still it returns, returns

to that dark pool.

She sleeps and hears waves.

She works and hears little whale calls.

She is a gate.

She is a cove.

She is dumb as a sea cave,

waiting to be startled

by the life within

or the blood emerging.