Maxine W. Kumin
Sonnets Uncorseted
2012
1
She was twenty-two. He was fifty-three,
a duke, a widower with ten children.
They met in Paris, each in exile from
the English Civil War. Virginal
and terrified, still she agreed
to marry him. Though women were mere chattel
spinsterhood made you invisible
in the sixteen hundreds. Marriage was arranged
—hers a rare exception. Despite a dowry
a woman never could own property.
Your womb was just for rent. Birth control
contrivances—a paste of ants, cow dung
mashed with honey, tree bark with pennyroyal—
all too often failed the applicant.
2
If anything went wrong you bled to death.
You bore & bore & bore as you were taught
screaming sometimes for days in childbirth.
To bring forth was a woman’s fate
but not for Margaret Cavendish, childless
Duchess of Newcastle. After the head
of Charles the First had been detached
and the Restoration seated a new monarch,
she and the duke returned to his estate
where nothing discomposed their paradise.
How rare, two lovers scribbling away,
admiring each other’s words in privacy.
He: polymath, equestrian, playwright.
She: philosopher, fantasist, poet.
3
His the first book on the art of dressage,
till then an untried humane approach
to teaching classic paces in the manège,
the grace of the levade and the piaffe.
Hers the goofy utopian fantasy,
The Blazing-World. The heroine is adrift
with her kidnapper in a wooden skiff.
A storm comes up conveniently, and they
are blown to the North Pole. He freezes to death
but she is carried to a contiguous
North Pole, a new world where the emperor
falls in love with her, makes her his empress
and cedes her all his powers over
clans of wildly invented creatures.
4
Poems, plays, philosophical
discourses on Platonic love,
a chapter on her Birth, Breeding, and Life
and an Apology for Writing so Much
Upon this Book about herself,
even some inquiries into science…
years in chosen isolation the Duchess
filled with words, and the Duke with reassurance.
Even this outburst did not discomfit him:
Men are so unconscionable and cruel
…they would fain Bury us in their…beds as in
a grave…[T]he truth is, we live like Bats or Owls,
Labour like Beasts, and die like Worms. Pepys
called her mad, conceited, and ridiculous.
5
Virginia Woolf, in 1928,
found her Quixotic and high-spirited
as well as somewhat crack-brained and bird witted
but went on to see in her a vein
of authentic fire. Eighty-odd years on,
flamboyant, eccentric, admittedly vain,
now she’s a respected foremother among
women of letters. Founded in 1997,
the Margaret Cavendish Society
— “international, established to provide
communication between scholars worldwide”—
is plumped with learned papers, confabs, dues.
She’s an aristocrat who advocates
—words worn across centuries—for women’s rights.
6
I went to college in the nineteen forties
read Gogol, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert.
Read Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky
and wrote exams that asked: contrast and compare.
Male novelists, male profs, male tutors, not
a single woman on the faculty
nor was there leaven found among the poets
I read and loved: G.M. Hopkins, A.E.
Housman, Auden, Yeats, only Emily
(not quite decoded or yet in the canon).
Ten years later, I struggled to break in
the almost all-male enclave of poetry.
Here’s a small glimpse in the the hierarchy:
famed Robert Lowell praising Marianne
7
as the best woman poet in America, put down
by Langston Hughes, bless his egalitarian
soul, who rose at the dinner to pronounce
her the best Negro woman poet in the nation.
Terrified of writing domestic poems,
poems pungent with motherhood, anathema
to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs,
somehow I balanced teaching freshman comp
half-time with kids, meals, pets, errands, spouse.
I wrote in secret, read drafts on the phone
with another restless mother, Anne Sexton,
and poco a poco our poems filled up the house.
Then one of us sold a poem to The New Yorker.
A week later, the other was welcomed in Harper’s.
8
But even as we published our first books
the visiting male bards required care.
We drove them to their readings far and near,
thence to the airport just in time to make
their flight to the next gig. You drive like a man,
they said by way of praise, and if a poem
of ours seemed worthy they said, you write like a man.
When asked what woman poet they read, with one
voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson.
Saintly Emily safely dead. Modern
women poets were dismissed as immature,
their poems pink with the glisten of female organs.
The virus of their disdain hung in the air
but women were now infected with ambition.
9
We didn’t merely saunter decade by decade.
We swept on past de Beauvoir and Friedan,
and took courage from Carolyn Kizer’s knife-blade
Pro Femina: I will speak about women
of letters for I’m in the racket, urging,
Stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors.
If a woman is to write, Virginia Woolf
has Mary Beton declare, she has to have
five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door,
a sacred space where Shakespeare’s sister Judith
might have equaled his prodigious gift
or not. She might have simply floated there,
set loose in the privilege of privacy, her self
unwritten, under no one else’s eyes…
10
Oh, Duchess, come hurdle five centuries
to a land of MFA’s in poetry,
of journals in print and even more online,
small presses popping up like grapes on vines,
reading staking place in every cranny,
prizes for first books, some with money.
Come to this apex of tenured women professors
where sessions on gender and race fill whole semesters
and students immerse themselves in women’s studies.
Meet famous poets who are also unabashed mothers
or singletons by choice or same-sex partners—
black, Latina, Asian, native American,
white , Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist—
come join us, Duchess Margaret Cavendish.
“Michael Field” (literary double of Katherine Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper)
Consistancy
1898
I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect, and in each she finds
Herself the goal: then why, intent to teaze
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her-I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge
As sorrowing, and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.
Aphra Behn
To the Fair Clarinda
1688
Who made love to me, Imagin’d more than woman.
Fair lovely Maid, or if that Title be
Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,
Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:
And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth.
This last will justifie my soft complaint,
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view.
Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain
With thy deluding Form thou giv’st us pain,
While the bright Nymph betrays us to the Swain.
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer’t sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest Flowers believes
A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.
Though beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join’d;
When e’er the Manly part of thee, wou’d plead
Though tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.
Wu Tsao
For the Courtesan Ch’ing Lin (Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung)
(born around 1800)
On your slender body
Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime
Like those of a celestial companion
Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven.
One smile from you when we meet,
And I become speechless and forget every word.
For too long you have gathered flowers,
And leaned against the bamboos,
Your green sleeves growing cold,
In your deserted valley:
I can visualize you all alone,
A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.
You glow like a perfumed lamp
In the gathering shadows.
We play wine games
And recite each other’s poems.
Then you sing `Remembering South of the River’
With its heart breaking verses. Then
We paint each other’s beautiful eyebrows.
I want to possess you completely –
Your jade body
And your promised heart.
It is Spring.
Vast mists cover the Five Lakes.
My dear, let me buy a red painted boat
And carry you away.
Charlotte Mew
On the Road to the Sea
1916
We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way,
I who make other women smile did not make you–
But no man can move mountains in a day.
So this hard thing is yet to do.
But first I want your life:–before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.
Now, if I look, I see you walking down the years,
Young, and through August fields–a face, a thought, a swinging dream
perched on a stile–;
I would have liked (so vile we are!) to have taught you tears
But most to have made you smile.
To-day is not enough or yesterday: God sees it all–
Your length on sunny lawns, the wakeful rainy nights–; tell me–;
(how vain to ask), but it is not a question–just a call–;
Show me then, only your notched inches climbing up the garden wall,
I like you best when you are small.
Is this a stupid thing to say
Not having spent with you one day?
No matter; I shall never touch your hair
Or hear the little tick behind your breast,
Still it is there,
And as a flying bird
Brushes the branches where it may not rest
I have brushed your hand and heard
The child in you: I like that best
So small, so dark, so sweet; and were you also then too grave and wise?
Always I think. Then put your far off little hand in mine;–
Oh! let it rest;
I will not stare into the early world beyond the opening eyes,
Or vex or scare what I love best.
But I want your life before mine bleeds away–
Here–not in heavenly hereafters–soon,–
I want your smile this very afternoon,
(The last of all my vices, pleasant people used to say,
I wanted and I sometimes got–the Moon!)
You know, at dusk, the last bird’s cry,
And round the house the flap of the bat’s low flight,
Trees that go black against the sky
And then–how soon the night!
No shadow of you on any bright road again,
And at the darkening end of this–what voice? whose kiss? As if you’d say!
It is not I who have walked with you, it will not be I who take away
Peace, peace, my little handful of the gleaner’s grain
From your reaped fields at the shut of day.
Peace! Would you not rather die
Reeling,–with all the cannons at your ear?
So, at least, would I,
And I may not be here
To-night, to-morrow morning or next year.
Still I will let you keep your life a little while,
See dear?
I have made you smile.
Qiu Jin
On Request for a Poem
Do not tell me women
are not the stuff of heroes,
I alone rode over the East Sea’s
winds for ten thousand leagues.
My poetic thoughts ever expand,
like a sail between ocean and heaven.
I dreamed of your three islands,
all gems, all dazzling with moonlight.
I grieve to think of the bronze camels,
guardians of China, lost in thorns.
Ashamed, I have done nothing
not one victory to my name.
I simply make my war horse sweat.
Grieving over my native land
hurts my heart. So tell me:
how can I spend these days here?
A guest enjoying your spring winds?
Joy Harjo
She Had some Horses
She had some horses.
She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.
She had some horses.
She had horses with eyes of trains.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.
She had some horses
She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shown and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.
She had some horses.
She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.
She had some horses.
She had horses who called themselves, “horse.”
She had horses who called themselves, “spirit,” and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.
She had some horses.
She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.
She had some horses.
She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed.
She had some horses
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
Edna St Vincent Millay
The Singing-Woman from the wood’s edge
from A few Figs from Thistles
1922
What should I be but a prophet and a liar,
Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,
What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?
And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog,
That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog?
And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar,
But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter?
You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe,
As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby,
You will find such flame at the wave’s weedy ebb
As flashes in the meshes of a mer-mother’s web,
But there comes to birth no common spawn
From the love of a priest for a leprechaun,
And you never have seen and you never will see
Such things as the things that swaddled me!
After all’s said and after all’s done,
What should I be but a harlot and a nun?
In through the bushes, on any foggy day,
My Da would come a-swishing of the drops away,
With a prayer for my death and a groan for my birth,
A-mumbling of his beads for all that he was worth.
And there sit my Ma, her knees beneath her chin,
A-looking in his face and a-drinking of it in,
And a-marking in the moss some funny little saying
That would mean just the opposite of all that he was praying!
He taught me the holy-talk of Vesper and of Matin,
He heard me my Greek and he heard me my Latin,
He blessed me and crossed me to keep my soul from evil,
And we watched him out of sight, and we conjured up the devil!
Oh, the things I haven’t seen and the things I haven’t known,
What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown,
And yanked both ways by my mother and my father,
With a “Which would you better?” and a “Which would you rather?”
With him for a sire and her for a dam,
What should I be but just what I am?
Edna St Vincent Millay
Sonnet 4 from A few Figs from Thistles
1922
I SHALL forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,–
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Elsa Gidlow
For the Goddess Too Well Known
1918
I have robbed the garrulous streets,
Thieved a fair girl from their blight,
I have stolen her for a sacrifice
That I shall make to this night.
I have brought her, laughing,
To my quietly dreaming garden.
For what will be done there
I ask no man pardon.
I brush the rouge from her cheeks,
Clean the black kohl from the rims
Of her eyes; loose her hair;
Uncover the glimmering, shy limbs.
I break wild roses, scatter them over her.
The thorns between us sting like love’s pain.
Her flesh, bitter and salt to my tongue,
I taste with endless kisses and taste again.
At dawn I leave her
Asleep in my wakening garden.
(For what was done there
I ask no man pardon.)
Love’s Acolyte
1919
Many have loved you with lips and fingers
And lain with you till the moon went out;
Many have brought you lover’s gifts!
And some have left their dreams on your doorstep.
But I who am youth among your lovers
Come like an acolyte to worship,
My thirsting blood restrained by reverence,
My heart a wordless prayer.
The candles of desire are lighted,
I bow my head, afraid before you,
A mendicant who craves your bounty
Ashamed of what small gifts she brings.
Natalie Barney
Double Being
1920
A northern mind, a face from Italy,
A double fate lived all too fatally,
A look fresh as a childs, both soft and sharp,
A clarion-voice, then liquid as a harp!
A natural being, yet from nature freed,
Like a Shakespearean boy of fairy breed —
A sex perplexed into attractive seeming
— Both sex at best, the strangeness so redeeming! —
Hands hard to loosen if for once they cling,
Yet frail as Leicester’s wearing a queen’s ring.
A page-clothed Rosalind to play a part,
A brow of genius and a lonely heart.
Lola Ridge
Dreams, 1918
Men die…
Dreams only change their houses.
They cannot be lined up against a wall
And quietly buried under ground,
And no more heard of…
However deep the pit and heaped the clay –
Like seedlings of old time
Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world –
Dreams will to light.
Lola Ridge
Tidings (Easter 1916),
1918
Censored lies that mimic truth…
Censored truth as pale as fear..
My heart is like a rousing bell –
And but the dead to hear…
My heart is like a mother bird,
Circling ever higher,
And the nest-tree rimmed about
By a forest fire…
My heart is like a lover foiled
By a broken stair –
They are fighting to-night in Sackville Street,
And I am not there!
Lucía Sánchez Saornil
Canto nuevo (1920)
[For English, scroll down. Sim trad]
¡Oh, cuánto tiempo HORA NUESTRA
te hemos esperado!, ¡cuánto!
Oh, cuántas veces tendimos
el cable de nuestra mirada limpia al futuro
y aplicamos el oído extático
al viento,
ávidos de distinguir
tu música en embrión!
¡Oh, cuántas veces
el diamante de nuestro deseo
partió el cristal del horizonte
buscándote más allá de la aurora!
Y al fin te poseemos,
HORA NUESTRA;
al fin podremos mecerte en nuestros brazos
y escribir tu claro nombre en nuestras frentes.
Hermanos,
he aquí, todo cumplido;
hagamos braserillos en el hueco de nuestras manos
para esta “LLAMA ALARGADA”.
El horizonte es la pauta, hermanos.
Nuestros martillos, pulidos y brillantes
como uña de mujer,
canten sobre las columnas truncas,
sobre los frisos rotos.
Tal un vendaval impetuoso
borremos todos los caminos,
arruinemos todos los puentes,
desarraiguemos todos los rosales;
sea todo liso como una laguna
para trazar después
la ciudad nueva.
Tiranos del esfuerzo
nuestros brazos levantarán esta vieja Tierra
como en una consagración.
Un abanico de llamas
consumirá las viejas vestiduras
y triunfaremos, desnudos y blancos,
como las estrellas.
Lo que hemos creado esta hora
alcanzaremos todas las audacias;
NOSOTROS EDIFICAREMOS
LAS PIRÁMIDES INVERTIDAS.
New Song (1920)
Oh how long OUR HOUR
we have waited for you! How long!
Oh how many times we’d lay
the cable of our clear gaze to the future
and we’d lend extatic ears to the wind
eager to grasp
your embryonic music!
Oh how many times
the diamond of our desire
broke the glass of horizon
looking for you beyond the aurora!
And finally we have you,
OUR HOUR;
finally we will rock you in our arms
and write your clear name on our foreheads.
Brothers,
it is here, all fulfilled
let’s make burners in the hollow of our hands
for this “SPREADING CRY”
The horizon is our guideline, brothers.
Our hammers, polished and shiny
like the nail of a woman
sing over truncated columns,
over broken friezes.
Like an impetuous wind,
let us erase all roads,
ruin all bridges,
uproot all rose bushes;
Let all be smooth as a pond
on which to trace
the new city.
Tyrants of effort
our arms rise this old Earth
like a consecration.
A range of flames
will consume the old garments
and we will triumph, naked and white,
like the stars.
What we will create in this hour
goes beyond all audacities;
WE WILL BUILD
THE INVERTED PYRAMIDS.
Lisa Gill
DOLLY SHOTS BEFORE AND AFTER SACCO AND VANZETTI
2011
for Lola Ridge
“Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day?”
– Judge Webster Thayer
A camera mounted on a wheeled platform is still
in 1914 silent
unlikely to catch the ways and means of night sweats
no talkies yet
only a handkerchief over the mouth
airborne idiom of pride
or shame
or TB
though a girl dumping a tattered doll into the ditch
makes the printing press by the 20’s
might have made nitrate film
flammable
with a quick pan to a man
“falling” 14 stories from the New York Department
of Justice in 1920.
Forgive me really I want to spoon
sugar
into the holes of Lola Ridge’s body
exhumed
as an apology she’d understand because today
and too often I cannot write
a political poem
though I also have done as girls do
practice early toying with the execution
of power knowing later
(or sooner) need
will necessitate empathy with the beaten
down or executed.
Even with the improperly eulogized
woman
who kept sickness under wraps while protesting
everything
she knew wrong coughing
blood is wrong is a red flag that wouldn’t pass
through congress
as a concept of economic care for the disabled
until more than a decade after
the 1943 development of streptomycin
two years after she was already dead and still.
Mina Loy
Parturition
1923
I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pinpoint nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without.
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension
I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time
Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal
The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait painter
Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment
Sings
“All the girls are tid’ly did’ly
All the girls are nice
Whether they wear their hair in curls
Or —”
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception Brute
Why?
The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.
He is running upstairs
I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes.
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself
Something in the delirium of night hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and
negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation
Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?
A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life
LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Tough of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was-is-ever-shall-be
Of cosmic reproductivity
Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat
Rises from the subconscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue bottles
— Epicurean –
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding
The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware
I once heard in a church
— Man and woman God made them —
Thank God.
Claude Cahun
Aveux Non Avenus (Cancelled Confessions), 1930
Section I
“I welcomed young monsters into myself and nurtured them. But the make-up I had used seemed indelible. I rubbed so hard to remove it that I took off all the skin. And my soul, like a flayed face, naked, no longer had a human form.”
Section II
“Tendency to push everything to the absolute, and thus: to the absurd.”
Section III
E.D.M.
“Surely you are not claiming to be more homosexual than I?…”
Section IV
C.M.C.
Permit me to warn reckless young women: seeing the trap doesn’t prevent you from getting caught in it and that doubles the pleasure.”
Section V:
“What does a well behaved child dream about, apart from the inhumane, the monstrous, the impossible? The ordinary.”
Section VI
“it is only when we resign ourselves to necessary partialities,
that we can allow our mask’s moulds to set”
Section VIII
“May the birds not expect any speeches about aviation from me.”
Section IX
“Angels with patched wings, sails: flirtations, last-minute modesties…let’s use up heaven down to the dregs, the verb down to the insult, the espadrille and the lyre down to the last string.”
Suzanne Bratcher
Gardening in MS
2008
I have a dog-eared book
on my shelf. It’s called
Gardening in the Southwest.
My friend Mary has a book
like it. It’s called
Gardening in the Tropics.
My friend Nadine has
one too. It’s called
Gardening in Granite.
Maybe I’ll write a new
book. I think I’ll call it
Gardening in MS.
Some chapters will be the same,
topics most gardeners
already know:
“Gardening in Small Spaces,”
“Gardening in Containers,”
“Gardening in Shade.”
Other chapters will be new,
you might even say
ground-breaking:
“Gardening in Moonlight,”
“Gardening in a Chair,”
“Gardening in Relapse.”
Not many gardeners will need
my book, but those who do
will discover it’s about
dirt under our fingernails
and the sometimes surprising
tenacity of life.
Pauli Murray
Returning Spring, 1970 (in the volume Dark Testament)
I’ll sink my roots far down
And drink from hidden rivers,
Renew my kinship with growing things—
The little ants will hold their congresses
Upon my arm, and cautious insects
Will make brief tours across my brows
And spiders spin webs from toe to toe.
The spears of sun will prick
No blade of grass to wakefulness
But I shall feel it tremble,
No further straw be laid upon a nest,
No twig but I shall see it quiver.
I’ll hear the symphonies within a stone,
Catch every murmur of the ground,
Travel the heavens with each vagrant cloud
And ark the golden islands in the sky.
Kishwar Naheed
The grass is really like me [Translated from Urdu to English by Rukhsana Ahmed]
1999
The grass is also like me
it has to unfurl underfoot to fulfil itself
but what does its wetness manifest:
a scorching sense of shame
or the heat of emotion?
The grass is also like me
As soon as it can raise its head
the lawnmower
obsessed with flattening it into velvet,
mows it down again.
How you strive and endeavour
to level woman down too!
But neither the earth’s nor woman’s
desire to manifest life dies.
Take my advice: the idea of making a footpath was a good one.
Those who cannot bear the scorching defeat of their courage
are grafted on to the earth.
That`s how they make way for the mighty
but they are merely straw not grass
-the grass is really like me.
Amy Lowell
A Lady, 1919
You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.
My vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.
Marilyn Hacker
Ivas Pantoum
1942
We pace each other for a long time.
I packed my anger with the beef jerky.
You are the baby on the mountain. I am
in a cold stream where I led you.
I packed my anger with the beef jerky.
You are the woman sticking her tongue out
in a cold stream where I led you.
You are the woman with spring water palms.
You are the woman sticking her tongue out.
I am the woman who matches sounds.
You are the woman with spring water palms.
I am the woman who copies.
You are the woman who matches sounds.
You are the woman who makes up words.
You are the woman who copies
her cupped palm with her fist in clay.
I am the woman who makes up words.
You are the woman who shapes
a drinking bowl with her fist in clay.
I am the woman with rocks in her pockets.
I am the woman who shapes.
I was a baby who knew names.
You are the child with rocks in her pockets.
You are the girl in a plaid dress.
You are the woman who knows names.
You are the baby who could fly.
You are the girl in a plaid dress
upside-down on the monkey bars.
You are the baby who could fly
over the moon from a swinging perch
upside-down on the monkey bars.
You are the baby who eats meat.
Over the moon from a swinging perch
the feathery goblin calls her sister.
You are the baby who eats meat
the bitch wolf hunts and chews for you.
The feathery goblin calls her sister:
“You are braver than your mother.
The bitch wolf hunts and chews for you.
What are you whining about now?”
You are braver than your mother
and I am not a timid woman:
what are you whining about now?
My palms itch with slick anger,
and I’m not a timid woman.
You are the woman I can’t mention;
my palms itch with slick anger.
You are the heiress of scraped knees.
You are the woman I can’t mention
to a woman I want to love.
You are the heiress of scaped knees:
scrub them in mountain water.
To a woman, I want to love
women you could turn into,
scrub them in mountain water,
stroke their astonishing faces.
Women you could turn into
the scare mask of Bad Mother
stroke their astonishing faces
in the silver-scratched sink mirror.
The scare mask of Bad Mother
crumbles to chunked, pinched clay,
sinks in the silver-scratched mirror.
You are the Little Robber Girl, who
crumbles the clay chunks, pinches
her friend, givers her a sharp knife.
You are the Little Robber Girl, who
was any witch’s youngest daughter.
Our friend gives you a sharp knife,
shows how the useful blades open.
Was any witch’s youngest daughter
golden and bold as you? You run and
show how the useful blades open.
You are the baby on the mountain. I am
golden and bold as you. You run and
we pace each other for a long time.
[Untitled]
1986
You did say, need me less and I’ll want you more.
I’m still shellshocked at needing anyone,
used to being used to it on my own.
It won’t be me out on the tiles till four-
thirty, while you’re in bed, willing the door
open with your need. You wanted her then,
more. Because you need to, I woke alone
in what’s not yet our room, strewn, though, with your
guitar, shoes, notebook, socks, trousers enjambed
with mine. Half the world was sleeping it off
in every other bed under my roof.
I wish I had a roof over my bed
to pull down on my head when I feel damned
by wanting you so much it looks like need.
Cheryl Clarke
living as a lesbian on 49’s final eve
40’s lasted much too long,
mercurial merchant of necessity.
You’ve spent a long time being young, and now must surrender it quietly, as you cross
over to that foxy stranger,
girlfriend.’
(I won’t celebrate her
for finding me,
forcing me to kiss her elegant feet, tawdry wench,
flashing and flagging me down whenever.)
She calls to me.
Runs to me.
I stop the car.
Tear off my clothes in the middle of the road.
Lose my shoes in the glass-studded grasses
nothing
1982
Nothing I wouldn’t do for the woman I sleep with
when nobody satisfy me the way she do.
kiss her in public places
win the lottery
take her in the ass
in a train lavatory
sleep three in a single bed
have a baby
to keep her wanting me.
wear leather underwear
remember my dreams
make plans and schemes
go down on her in front of her
other lover
give my jewelry away
to keep her wanting me.
sell my car
tie her to the bed post and
spank her
lie to my mother
let her watch me fuck my other lover
miss my only sister’s wedding
to keep her wanting me.
buy her cocaine
show her the pleasure in danger
bargain
let her dress me in colorful costumes
of low cleavage and slit to the crotch
giving easy access
to keep her wanting me.
Nothing I wouldn’t do for the woman I sleep with
when nobody satisfy me the way she do.
Renée Vivien
The Touch (translated by Margaret Porter and Catherine Kroger)
1901-1909
The trees have kept some lingering sun in their branches,
Veiled like a woman, evoking another time,
The twilight passes, weeping. My fingers climb,
Trembling, provocative, the line of your haunches.
My ingenious fingers wait when they have found
The petal flesh beneath the robe they part.
How curious, complex, the touch, this subtle art–
As the dream of fragrance, the miracle of sound.
I follow slowly the graceful contours of your hips,
The curves of your shoulders, your neck, your upappeased breasts.
In your white voluptuousness my desire rests,
Swooning, refusing itself the kisses of your lips.
Willyce Kim
In This Heat
1972
In this heat
we gather ourselves
and hold together
day folding into night
we press for darkness
as if the heat
would steal away
like some errant ship,
vanquished by the moon
and stars,
we close our eyes
the night half-swollen
with the whispers of the day.
Out, across the way
a dog barks.
…
Tonight I hold your
hands between my palms.
Afraid of yesterday.
Uncertain of tomorrow.
Outside the moon pales
against the window
as shadow laps across
the sky.
Sleep flutters
like burning incense.
We curl into darkness
and are gone.
Mary Oliver
The Journey
1992
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations, though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Judy Grahn
Vera, from my childhood
Solemnly swearing, to swear as an oath to you
who have somehow gotten to be a pale old woman;
swearing, as if an oath could be wrapped around
your shoulders
like a new coat;
For your 28 dollars a week and the bastard boss
you never let yourself hate;
and the work, all the work you did at home
where you never got paid;
For your mouth that got thinner and thinner
until it disappeared as if you had choked on it,
watching the hard liquor break your fine husband down
into a dead joke.
For the strange mole, like a third eye
right in the middle of your forehead;
for your religion which insisted that people
are beautiful golden birds and must be preserved;
for your persistent nerve
and plain white talk–
the common woman is as common
as good bread
as common as when you couldnt go on
but did.
For all the world we didnt know we held in common
all along
the common is as common as the best of bread
and will rise
and will become strong–I swear it to you
I swear it to you on my own head
I swear it to you on my common
woman’s
head
Bejan Matur
Women
Translated by Suat Karantay
2007
With their blue tattoos
And bruises from endless mournings
They stand still looking at the fire
They all shiver when the wind blows
Their breasts bend to the earth
Carrying burning wood in their hands
Old as black rusty cauldrons
Women continue their wandering
When the fire bursts in a rage
Voices multiply
The fire burns incessantly there
Extinguishing it is such a hassle
Women with shrunken breasts
Are thinking of the hardness of the wood
They’ll hold in their uncommonly slender hands
And keep silent
It is hard to guess their age when they are silent
They smell of the earth when they cry out
Unable to recollect where to direct their glances
They let their eyes rest upon the earth
As clouds are not permanent in the sky
They relinquish themselves to the earth
Cordially
And occasionally exude a fragrance
Carolyn Kizer
Pro Femina, 1960s (first 3 sections)-2000
ONE
From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie
The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters.
Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.
Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices
Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart:
Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted
To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—
“Think I’m crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,
As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those
Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it.
While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,
Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines.
Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery
Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient
Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male—
I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions
Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen,
Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.
I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine
But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me.
Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,
Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken,
Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known
Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;
Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions;
We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,
“Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance
In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades
Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence
And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,
Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!
TWO
I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,”
Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties
Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons;
Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed,
Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties
In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners,
And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions
Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes,
Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even.
But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.
So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?
We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,
Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then
For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine
Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting.
Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient
Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released
Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,
Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s
Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,
Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine
Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me,
In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages.
Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,
In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!
Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.
The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness.
So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:
Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else.
You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.
So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,
All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!
Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?
What pomegranate raised you from the dead,
Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?
THREE
I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket.
Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman.
And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters
On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers.
Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant,
Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns.
Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen;
Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists
Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles
With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas
When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,
The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail.
I suppose they reacted from an earlier womanly modesty
When too many girls were scabs to their stricken sisterhood,
Impugning our sex to stay in good with the men,
Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must have swaggered
When women themselves endorsed their own inferiority!
Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into several,
They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful journals,
Aiming to please a posterity that despises them.
But we’ll always have traitors who swear that a woman surrenders
Her Supreme Function, by equating Art with aggression
And failure with Femininity. Still, it’s just as unfair
To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity
When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:
Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity.
But even with masculine dominance, we mares and mistresses
Produced some sleek saboteuses, making their cracks
Which the porridge-brained males of the day were too thick to perceive,
Mistaking young hornets for perfectly harmless bumblebees.
Being thought innocuous rouses some women to frenzy;
They try to be ugly by aping the ways of men
And succeed. Swearing, sucking cigars and scorching the bedspread,
Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown
In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man!
This drives other women mad in a mist of chiffon.
(One poetess draped her gauze over red flannels, a practical feminist.)
But we’re emerging from all that, more or less,
Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly priestesses
Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition.
Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem normal;
If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry;
If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors;
If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our true limitations
Without making an unseemly show of trying to unfreeze our assets;
Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried;
And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes
And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children,
Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour,
And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.
Selima Hill
Cow
2008
I want to be a cow
and not my mother’s daughter.
I want to be a cow
and not in love with you.
I want to feel free to feel calm.
I want to be a cow who never knows
the kind of love you ‘fall in love with’ with;
a queenly cow, with hips as big and sound
as a department store,
a cow the farmer milks on bended knee,
who when she dies will feel dawn
bending over her like lawn to wet her lips.
I want to be a cow,
nothing fancy –
a cargo of grass,
a hammock of soupy milk
whose floating and rocking and dribbling’s undisturbed
by the echo of hooves to the city;
of crunching boots;
of suspicious-looking trailers parked on verges;
of unscrupulous restaurant-owners
who stumble, pink-eyed, from stale beds
into a world of lobsters and warm telephones;
of streamlined Japanese freighters
ironing the night,
heavy with sweet desire like bowls of jam.
The Tibetans have 85 words for states of consciousness.
This dozy cow I want to be has none.
She doesn’t speak.
She doesn’t do housework or worry about her appearance.
She doesn’t roam.
Safe in her fleet
of shorn-white-bowl-like friends,
she needs, and loves, and’s loved by,
only this –
the farm I want to be a cow on too.
Don’t come looking for me.
Don’t come walking out into the bright sunlight
looking for me,
black in your gloves and stockings and sleeves
and large hat.
Don’t call the tractorman.
Don’t call the neighbours.
Don’t make a special fruit-cake for when I come home:
I’m not coming home.
I’m going to be a cowman’s counted cow.
I’m going to be a cow
and you won’t know me.
Anne Sexton
Her Kind
1960
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Adrienne Rich
Cartographies of Silence
1971
A conversation begins
with a lie. And each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy. Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
the syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word
The technology of science
The rituals, the etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
The silence that strips bare:
In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan
Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank spaces or as words
stretched like skin over meanings
but as silence falls at the end
of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn
The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
This is useless to you and perhaps to others
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything–
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew
It if could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn
till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingers
or the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain
for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, these conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green
Eileen Myles
An American Poem
1991
I was born in Boston in
1949. I never wanted
this fact to be known, in
fact I’ve spent the better
half of my adult life
trying to sweep my early
years under the carpet
and have a life that
was clearly just mine
and independent of
the historic fate of
my family. Can you
imagine what it was
like to be one of them,
to be built like them,
to talk like them
to have the benefits
of being born into such
a wealthy and powerful
American family. I went
to the best schools,
had all kinds of tutors
and trainers, traveled
widely, met the famous,
the controversial, and
the not-so-admirable
and I knew from
a very early age that
if there were ever any
possibility of escaping
the collective fate of this famous
Boston family I would
take that route and
I have. I hopped
on an Amtrak to New
York in the early
‘70s and I guess
you could say
my hidden years
began. I thought
Well I’ll be a poet.
What could be more
foolish and obscure.
I became a lesbian.
Every woman in my
family looks like
a dyke but it’s really
stepping off the flag
when you become one.
While holding this ignominious
pose I have seen and
I have learned and
I am beginning to think
there is no escaping
history. A woman I
am currently having
an affair with said
you know you look
like a Kennedy. I felt
the blood rising in my
cheeks. People have
always laughed at
my Boston accent
confusing “large” for
“lodge,” “party”
for “potty.” But
when this unsuspecting
woman invoked for
the first time my
family name
I knew the jig
was up. Yes, I am,
I am a Kennedy.
My attempts to remain
obscure have not served
me well. Starting as
a humble poet I
quickly climbed to the
top of my profession
assuming a position of
leadership and honor.
It is right that a
woman should call
me out now. Yes,
I am a Kennedy.
And I await
your orders.
You are the New Americans.
The homeless are wandering
the streets of our nation’s
greatest city. Homeless
men with AIDS are among
them. Is that right?
That there are no homes
for the homeless, that
there is no free medical
help for these men. And women.
That they get the message
—as they are dying—
that this is not their home?
And how are your
teeth today? Can
you afford to fix them?
How high is your rent?
If art is the highest
and most honest form
of communication of
our times and the young
artist is no longer able
to move here to speak
to her time…Yes, I could,
but that was 15 years ago
and remember—as I must
I am a Kennedy.
Shouldn’t we all be Kennedys?
This nation’s greatest city
is home of the business-
man and home of the
rich artist. People with
beautiful teeth who are not
on the streets. What shall
we do about this dilemma?
Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
what the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.
Am I alone tonight?
I don’t think so. Am I
the only one with bleeding gums
tonight. Am I the only
homosexual in this room
tonight. Am I the only
one whose friends have
died, are dying now.
And my art can’t
be supported until it is
gigantic, bigger than
everyone else’s, confirming
the audience’s feeling that they are
alone. That they alone
are good, deserved
to buy the tickets
to see this Art.
Are working,
are healthy, should
survive, and are
normal. Are you
normal tonight? Everyone
here, are we all normal.
It is not normal for
me to be a Kennedy.
But I am no longer
ashamed, no longer
alone. I am not
alone tonight because
we are all Kennedys.
And I am your President.
Nellie Wong
Ode to Rice Crust Soup
2012
The jingoism dressed in fatigues
our boys and girls fighting
over there, in Afghanistan,
for our sanctity of life,
for democracy, that old goat
who used to point his fingers
at you and off we’d go
into the wild blue yonder
killing people who looked like
some of us in Vietnam,
in Grenada, in Korea, whatever land
our government warrants
needs defending ’cause
Whoa! Democracy’s cool.
Sujata Bhatt
What Happened to the Elephant?
1997
What happened to the elephant
the one whose head Shiva stole
to bring his son Ganesh
back to life?
This is child’s curiosity,
The rosy imagination
that continues
probing, looking for a way
to believe the fantasy
a way to prolong the story.
If Ganesh could still be Ganesh
With an elephant’s head,
Then couldn’t the body of that elephant
find another life
with a horse’s head-for example?
And if we found
a horse’s head to revive
the elephant’s body-
who is the true elephant?
And what shall we do about the horse’s body?
Still the child refuses
to accept Shiva’s carelessness
and searches for a solution
without death.
But now when I gaze
at the framed postcard
of Ganesh on my wall,
I also picture a rotting carcass
of a beheaded elephant
lying crumpled up
on its side, covered with bird shit,
vulture shit-
Oh, that elephant
whose head survived
for Ganesh,
he dies, of course, but the others
in his heard, the hundreds
in his family must have found him.
They stared at him for hours
with their slow swaying sadness…
How they turned and turned
in a circle, with their trunks
facing outwards and then inwards
toward the headless one.
This is a dance,
a group dance
no one talks about.
Pat Parker
1973
“How do we know that the panthers
will accept a gift from
white — middle — class — women?”
Have you ever tried to hide?
In a group
of women
hide
yourself
slide between the floor boards
slide yourself away child
away from this room
& your sister
before she notices
your Black self &
her white mind
slide your eyes
down
away from the other Blacks
afraid — a meeting of eyes
& pain would travel between you –
change like milk to buttermilk
a silent rage.
SISTER! your foot’s smaller,
but it’s still on my neck.
WHERE WILL YOU BE?
(1978)
Boots are being polished
Trumperters clean their horns
Chains and locks forged
The crusade has begun.
Once again flags of Christ
are unfurled in the dawn
and cries of soul saviors
sing apocalyptic on air waves.
Citizens, good citizens all
parade into voting booths
and in self-righteous sanctity
X away our right to life.
I do not believe as some
that the vote is an end,
I fear even more
It is just a beginning.
So I must make assessment
Look to you and ask:
Where will you be when they come?
They will not come
a mob rolling
through the streets,
but quickly and quietly
move into our homes
and remove the evil,
the queerness,
the faggotry,
the perverseness
from their midst.
They will not come
clothed in brown,
and swastikas, or
bearing chest heavy with
gleaming crosses.
The time and need
for ruses are over.
They will come
in business suits
to buy your homes
and bring bodies to
fill your jobs.
They will come in robes
to rehabilitate
and white coats
to subjugate
and where will you be
when they come?
Where will we all be
when they come?
And they will come —
they will come
because we are
defined as opposite –
perverse
and we are perverse.
Every time we watched
a queer hassled in the
streets and said nothing –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we lied about
the boyfriend or girlfriend
at coffee break –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we heard,
“I don’t mind gays
but why must they
be blatant?” and said nothing –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we let a lesbian mother
lose her child and did not fill
the courtroom –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we let straights
make out in our bars while
we couldn’t touch because
of laws –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we put on the proper
clothes to go to a family
wedding and left our lovers
at home –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we heard
“Who I go to bed with
is my personal choice –
It’s personal not political”
and said nothing –
It was an act of perversion.
Everytime we let straight relatives
bury our dead and push our
lovers away –
It was an act of perversion.
And they will come.
They will come for
the perverts
& it won’t matter
if you’re
homosexual, not a faggot
lesbian, not a dyke
gay, not queer
It won’t matter
if you
own your business
have a good job
or are on S.S.I.
It won’t matter
if you’re
Black
Chicano
Native American
Asian
or White
It won’t matter
if you’re from
New York
or Los Angeles
Galveston
or Sioux Falls
It won’t matter
if you’re
Butch, or Fem
Not into roles
Monogamous
Non Monogamous
It won’t matter
if you’re
Catholic
Baptist
Atheist
Jewish
or M.C.C.
They will come
They will come
to the cities
and to the land
to your front rooms
and in your closets.
They will come for
the perverts
and where will
you be
When they come?
Gwendolyn Brooks
Riot
1969
A riot is the language of the unheard.
—martin luther king
John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray
and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,
the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.
Because the Negroes were coming down the street.
Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty
(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not detainable. And not discreet.
Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot
itched instantly beneath the nourished white
that told his story of glory to the World.
“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered
to any handy angel in the sky.
But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove
and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath
the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,
malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old
averted doubt jerked forward decently,
cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,
and the desperate die expensively today.”
John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire
and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!
Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”
May Ayim
no more rotten gray – for a colorful republic
1990
for Tina, Gülsen, Yara and Nita
talk – talk – show for the blah – blah – struggle
on special occasions
and for special events
but especially
shortly before
and shortly after elections
we’re in demand again
we’re taken notice of again
we’re suddenly addressed
we’re finally included
we suddenly seem indispensable
we are even
flown over
on your invitation of course
as the “dear alien citizens”
naturally without civil rights
as migrants
from the countries of the world
as experts in matters of racism
as the ones “afflicted”
together with activists and politicians
celebrities and the socially committed
we discuss analyze debate
about
demands protest actions appeals
in discussions hearings talk-shows
on a panel in a forum or plenum
and then – what next
the demands
are neatly
listed
the lists
are neatly
filed
and surely
and reliably
forwarded
to the right places
with the truly
responsible people
and then – what next
the show is over
we all go home
the socially committed feel relieved – partly
the afflicted feel they’ve been taken for a ride – totally
the “dear alien citizens”
still without civil rights of course
once again turn into the “spics”, “pakis” or “chinks” from next
door
the black or however
hyphenated germans
change back into the “Negroes”
from really far away
once again we are those
the whitewashers of history
already over-looked yesterday
or dis-covered
described defined instructed
in broken g / er / man
on the street
or in highly abstract studies
in a v-e-r-y s-c-i-e-n-t-i-f-ic language
we are patiently told over and over
which way to go
why
INTEGRATION
is written in capitals
why and how
we are oppressed
why and how and when
we must liberate ourselves
why and how and when and where and most important
that doesn’t take many words
nor lots of space
no
not really
the leftist alternative daily paper – so-called
for example only needs about two pages for international news
compared to about seven pages for german-german affairs
the so-called yellow press
quote: “germany in liberty that is our mission”
does it even quicker
shorter
more to the point
more capturing
the
north-south-monologue
that doesn’t take many words
no, not really
that’s why they hardly ever ask us
there’s no space anyway
whereas we’re still indispensable of course
at least on special occasions
or for special events
but certainly
shortly before the next elections
they will remember us again
we’ll definitely have to be a part of it
we’ll be allowed to proclaim our distress
must in fact do so
should in fact
put our demands into words
and really blast the trumpet
or at least sing a song
no more rotten gray – for a colorful republic
but
the “dear alien citizens”
although or because
still without civil rights
dress up for their own celebrations
and also the black
or however hyphenated germans
no longer come because they’ve been invited
but only
when they want to
they’re gradually getting cheeky
bad luck
luckily!
Etel Adnan
To Be In A Time Of War (2003)
[…]
To notice that mirrors shine during the night and that the mail is waiting to be answered. To worry about the war being waged so far away, so secretly. To already think of the next war. To hammer one’s anguish on oneself. To bring about a bird’s world in one’s imagination. To gaze at the Hudson River through one’s eyelashes. To spit pollution. To drive through a green light. To avoid an accident. To become an object. To become the object that that object protects. To hang on nothing. To live with no desires.
To try to be distracted by poetry, by trees. To see the trees grow, in a hurry. To appear and disappear. To take refuge from bestial conquest in false shelters. To chase the refugee, to flush him out of his new refuge. To lodge a bullet in the head and the back of a Palestinian. To add Iraqis to the butchery. To paint big canvases with blood then take a night train, then a plane. To disembark in Paris. To pick up the telephone, dial a number for Beirut. To hear the friend say that a Palestinian newsman has been cold bloodedly shot by some earnest monotheist. To wonder on the necessity of God. To brush the problem aside. To think of Cassandra. To remember the Hammurabi Code. To sink in fat. To look at the narrow and long road which leads the world to the slaughter-house.
Nelly Sachs
Landscape Of Screams
translated by Catterel and Catherine Sommer
1966
That is the planetary hour of the refugees.
That is the headlong flight of the refugees
into the falling sickness, into death!
That is the starfall magically caught
on the threshold, the hearth, the bread.
That is the black apple of knowledge,
fear!
The sun of love extinguished and
still smoking!
That is the flower of haste,
dripping with sweat!
Those are the hunters
from the void, made only of flight.
Those are the hunted, carrying their deadly hiding places
into their graves.
That is the sand, startled
with garlands of goodbye.
That is the earth’s venture into the open,
its breath caught
in air’s humility.
Nandini Sahu
Bridge in Making
2012
I am an Indian poet in English!
How long shall I wear this elegant
garland? Can I even put it down?
Poetry in English is like a passion for empire building.
It’s the subaltern speaking
the words pleading to be universally, intently heard.
I guess what I write is no English.
Still it’s a negotiable alternative
to breathing, to the art of living.
It’s the aroma to keep my spirits buoyant.
It’s a reconciliation, a bridge-in-making,
between the privileged and the marginalized.
Oh Muses! Teach me how to break down
this boundary – poets and Indian English poets–erected
since ages, between the periphery and the centre.
Make my poetry as delicious as
watered-rice-brinjal-fry and
dry-fish. To look the world in the eye.
I write in English to free my words
lying imprisoned in the arms of the heart.
Be it Orissan or Indian, but it’s out of this earth and wind.
I am the drunkard and I am the glass
of beer. I have committed no sin
which you haven’t ; I share your fate.
Odia is to think ,feel, dream and
be my funeral pyre. English, to me,
is my garland and my sword, my sole refuge.
It’s the voice of my longings and belongings.
honest as the west wind and the yearly floods in
coastal Indian villages, it’s the frozen marrow in my bones.
But it gives me a name, my very own.
It comes to me without tireless waiting.
It torrents with the haste of the Yamuna in July rain.
Language is like raindrops shaped into a pearl.
It’s like happy-healthy sprouted beans ; like red wine
from Goa; like silken embroidery on my outfit.
It kick-starts the day with the mercury boiled,
it clears all barriers between the
heart and the home and hearth.
The alphabets of the English I use, with their
jingling anklets, flood my world with joy.
Poetry falls down in droplets, the stars melt away.
I am Indian, Odia by birth, with
wheatish brown skin, dark eyes. I am just a
poet – English or no English– my taverns filled with Muses.
Audre Lorde
Who Said It Was Simple
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.
Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex
and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.
A poem by Cameron (from genderqueerpoetry.tumblr.com), 2013
I try to be myself, as they always said
But I am shackled to this giveway chest and high-pitched breath
I am imprisoned by my body
Restricted to picking one- boy or girl
When I really am both
And the one I would pick is the one the world decides I am not
Hello, miss, can I help you
Miss, you dropped this
Miss, this is the men’s clothes
Miss, miss, miss, they all missed who I am
The onslaught of girl, girl, girl
Imprisons the man inside me
And the man inside me
Squashes the girl that still tries to show her face
That still wants to wear makeup and jewelry
And be called her own name
And the one time they almost got it right
Is the one time she’s in full bloom
Sir-
My name is Elena
Oh, sorry, miss.
I lied.
My name is Cameron.
Are you a boy or a-
I am.
Joy Ladin
North and South
2009
Don’t underestimate your need
to cross the line. Frozen
on the wrong side of your desire
to remake the world
inverted in the mirror
of your otherness,
how can you be true
to the truth of being human,
something that bends
in a universe that doesn’t, a messy blend
of guts and spirit, responsibility and shame?
You are only an inch
from the constantly moving
source of life, no matter how passionately
you crush yourself
into the boxes – male or female, north or south, poor or rich, white
or some other social shade – you check
because you are scared
to cross the lines that keep you safe
from more complicated combinations
of love and loneliness,
rocking your soul to sleep
while you stuff your body
into too-tight boxes, knowing no one will mind
you don’t have the guts to live
as long as you stay
on your side of the line.
June Jordan
Poem about My Rights
1980
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a
boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one/a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
Maya Angelou
On the Pulse of Morning
1993
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no more hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers- desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot…
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours- your Passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
Merle Woo
Jelly Beans
2003
The harmony of a million languages —
Colors never before seen;
People with
Cultures so many so rich always changing
Each with a sense of place
Not ownership.
And also,
We began to see people
Becoming tangible and real,
Becoming their potential.
A thousand-fold of gender expressions —
A wild flourishing of sexualities —
The nuclear family unit had
Disappeared,
Because everyone had everything
Collectively
Males and females were equal
Children were no longer
Blue and pink incipient workers.
It didn’t matter anymore if you
Were mannish or womanish —
Why, you could be
Two spirits, three spirits, four —
Fluid, changing by choice
Or desire,
Merging
Interpenetration of sexualities —
And genders —
For some
Clearly male and female for others —
So many expressions
And speakings out
We no longer laughed at
But admired
The chick who kept her dick —
The tomboy who grew up to be a man,
The tomboy who grew up to be a lesbian,
The tomboy who grew up to be a woman —
The girlboygirl who is still changing
The girl man who is trying to find
The boy he had lost.
We decided that gender expressions
Like racial expressions
Were like jelly beans —
One alone is pretty enough
But one among many
Multi-flavored, multi-colored
Jelly beans
Is
Ecstasy!
Lisa Robertson
[It was Jessica Grim the American Poet…]
2001
It was Jessica Grim the American poet
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc.
Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different
from the daily protests and cashbars.
I now unknowingly speed towards
which of all acts, words, conditions —
I am troubled that I do not know.
When I feel depressed in broad daylight
depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen
smearing the windowsill, I picture
the bending pages of La Bâtarde
and I think of wind. The outspread world is
comparable to a large theatre
or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps
is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing
my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking
about a cheap paperback which fans and
slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched
taut between new knees, head turned back, I
hold down a branch,
Violette Leduc
Excerpt from Thérèse and Isabelle
Translated by Derek Coltman
1967
I wandered away from the others over toward the lavatories. I went in. An odor halfway between the chemical smell of a candy factory and that of school disinfectant still hung inside the little cubicle. But my loathing for these exhalations from the general disinfecting process that always sapped our energies on the first evening back at school had left me. The odor was a backdrop awaiting our meeting. The shrieks of the younger girls receded behind me. A vapor rose from the pale, much-scrubbed wood of the seat: the vapor of tenderness given off by a mass of flaxen hair. I leaned over the bowl. The sleeping water gave me back a reflection of my face before the creation of the world. I fingered the handle, its chain, then took away my hand. The chain swung to and fro beside the melancholy water. Someone called to me. I didn’t dare put on the hook and shut myself in.
“Open it,” the voice begged.
Someone was rattling the doors.
I could see the eye. It was blocking the heart-shaped air-hole cut in the lavatory door.
“My love.”
Isabelle was there from the land of meteors, of avalanches, of wrecks, of plunder. She had thrown me a word of liberation, a program; she was bringing me the invigorating breath of the North Sea. I had the strength to remain silent, even as I swelled with pride.
She was waiting for me, but that did not guarantee security. The word she had used was too strong. We looked at one another, we were paralyzed.
I threw myself into her arms.
Her lips were trying to find Thérèses in my hair, in my neck, in the folds of my pinafore, between my fingers, along my shoulder. Why couldn’t I reproduce myself a thousand times and offer her a thousand Thérèses… I was nothing but myself, and that was not enough. I wasn’t a forest. A blade of grass in my hair, a piece of confetti in the folds of my pinafore, a ladybug between my fingers, a piece of fluff on my neck, a scar on my cheek would have given me more body. Why wasn’t I the weeping locks of a willow tree beneath her hand as it stroked my hair?
I made a frame for her face: “My love.”
Maureen N. McLane
Best Laid
2013
it’s clear
the wind
won’t let up
and a swim’s out —
what you planned
is scotched.
forget the calls,
errands at the mall —
yr resolve’s
superfluous
as a clitoris.
how miraculous
the gratuitous —
spandrels,
on a sea
of necessity
let’s float
wholly
unnecessary
& call
that free
Ferron
Girl on a Road, from the album “Driver”
1994
My momma was a waitress, my daddy a truckdriver. The thing that kept their power from them slowed me down awhile. I remember the morning that was the closing of my youth, when I said goodbye to no one and in that way faced my truth…and a walk along the river… and a rain a’coming down…and a girl on a road.
There’s a rhythm to a highway to match the rhythm of your fears. My shopping bag possessions scattered with my splattered tears. A string of nights in truck stops and in darkness and in lies and a man they all called Tigerboy…he just had to show me why. He just had to give me something I’d forever understand…as a girl on a road.
Rain upon the water makes footprints sunk in sand. Anger upon angry hurt, take me by the hand. Take me by the heartstrings and pull me deep inside and say I’m one with your forgiveness and separate from my pride.
I don’t know what it’s like for you but here’s what it’s like for me… I wanted to turn beautiful and serve Eternity and never follow money or love with greasy hands, or move the earth and waters just to make it fit my plans. My eyes would be the harbor, my words the perfect place for a girl on a road.
I met you in the Summer, I left you in the Fall. In between we did some living…I like to think that’s all…but now I see words can be like weapons no matter that they’re small, and I used three tiny words on you and then beat it down the hall. Does this road go on forever? Does this terror know no end…for a girl on a road? Would you like to sing it with me?
Rain upon the water makes footprints sunk in sand. Anger upon angry hurt, take me by the hand. Take me by the heartstrings and pull me deep inside and say I’m one with your forgiveness and separate from my pride.
You cannot measure what it takes to mend a withered heart. They’ll tell you at the onset everybody does their part. I did my best to follow the calling of my soul. But, it’s like that first guitar I played…at the center is a hole, at the center is a…longing… that I cannot understand as a girl on a road.
But if music be a boulder, let me carry it a long while. Let it turn into a feather, let it brush against my smile. Let the life be somewhat settled with the life that song has made. Let there be nothing I am longing for in some plan I may have made, in some story quickly written during a long forgotten time as a girl on a road. Sing it with me…
Rain upon the water makes footprints sunk in sand. Anger upon angry hurt, take me by the hand. Take me by the heartstrings and pull me deep inside and say I’m one with your forgiveness and separate from my pride.
Audre Lorde
Making Love To Concrete
An upright abutment in the mouth
of the Willis Avenue bridge
a beige Honda leaps the divider
like a steel gazelle inescapable
sleek leather boots on the pavement
rat-a-tat-tat best intentions
going down for the third time
stuck in the particular
You cannot make love to concrete
if you care about being
non-essential wrong or worn thin
if you fear ever becoming
diamonds or lard
you cannot make love to concrete
if you cannot pretend
concrete needs your loving
To make love to concrete
you need an indelible feather
white dresses before you are ten
a confirmation lace veil milk-large bones
and air raid drills in your nightmares
no stars till you go to the country
and one summer when you are twelve
Con Edison pulls the plug
on the street-corner moons Walpurgisnacht
and there are sudden new lights in the sky
stone chips that forget you need
to become a light rope a hammer
a repeatable bridge
garden-fresh broccoli two dozen dropped eggs
and a hint of you
caught up between my fingers
the lesson of a wooden beam
propped up on barrels
across a mined terrain
between forgiving too easily
and never giving at all.
Maureen Seaton
Snow
1991
White people leave the express
at 96th Street, collectively,
like pigeons from a live wire
or hope from the hearts of Harlem.
And I’m one of them, although
my lover sleeps two stops north between
Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell
Boulevards, wishing my ass
were cupped inside her knees and belly,
wishing this in a dream thick
with inequalities.
I live on Riverside Drive. My face
helped get me here. I was
ruddy with anticipation the day
I interviewed for the rooms
near the park with its
snow-covered maples. I was full
of undisguised hope as I
strolled along the river, believing
I belonged there, that my people
inherited this wonderland
unequivocally, as if they deserved it.
My lover buys twinkies from the Arabs,
bootleg tapes on ‘25th,
and carries a blade in her back
pocket although her hands
are the gentlest I’ve known.
She ignores the piss smells
on the corner, the sirens
at 4 A.M., the men whose brains
have dissolved in rum. And tries
to trust a white woman who
sleeps near the trees of Riverside.
When we go out together,
we avoid expensive
cafés on Columbus Avenue, jaunts
to the Upper East Side. Harlem
eyes us suspiciously or with
contempt beneath half-closed lids.
We have friends there,
hidden in the ruins like gold, who
accept us. When it snows,
we walk boldly anywhere, as if the snow
were a protection, or a death.
Olga Broumas
RUMPLESTILTSKIN
1977
First night.
Mid-winter.
Frightened
with pleasure as I came.
Into your arms, salt
crusting the aureoles.
Our white breasts. Tears
and tears. You
saying
I don’t know
if I’m hurting or loving
you. I
didn’t either.
We went on
trusting. Your will to care
for me intense
as a laser. Slowly
my body’s cellblocks
yielding
beneath its beam.
i have to write of these things. We were grown
women, well
traveled in our time.
☼
Did anyone
ever encourage you, you ask
me, casual
in afternoon light. You blaze
fierce with protective anger as I shake
my head, puzzled, remembering, no
no. You blaze
a beauty you won’t claim. To name
yourself beautiful makes you as vulnerable
as feeling
pleasure and claiming it
makes me. I call you lovely. Over
and over, cradling
your ugly memories as they burst
their banks, tears and tears, I call
you lovely. Your face
will come to trust that judgment, to bask
in its own clarity like sun. Grown women. Turning
heliotropes to our own, to our lovers’ eyes.
☼
Laughter. New in my lungs still, awkward
on my face. Fingernails
growing back
over decades of scar and habit, bottles
of bitter quinine rubbed into them, and chewed
on just the same. We are not the same. Two
women, laughing
in the streets, loose-limbed
with other women. Such things are dangerous.
Nine
millions have burned for less.
☼
How to describe
what we didn’t know
exists: a mutant organ, its function to feel
intensely, to heal by immersion, a fluid
element, crucial
as amnion, sweet milk
in the suckling months.
The words we need are extinct.
Or if not extinct
badly damaged: the proud Columbia
stubbing
her bound up feet on her dammed
up bed. Helpless with excrement. Daily
by accident, against
what has become our will through years
of deprivation, we spawn the fluid
that cradles us, grown
as we are, and at a loss
for words. Against all currents, upstream
we spawn
in each other’s blood.
☼
Tongues
sleepwalking in caves. Pink shells. Sturdy
diggers. Archeologists of the right
the speechless zones
of the brain.
Awake, we lie
if we try to use them, to salvage some part
of the loamy dig. It’s like
forgiving each other, you said
borrowing from your childhood priest.
Sister, to wipe clean
with a musty cloth
what is clean already
is not forgiveness, the clumsy housework
of a bachelor god. We both know, well
in our prime, which is cleaner: the cave-
dwelling womb, or the colonized
midwife:
the tongue.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Violent Rooms
2007
1.
The contours of the girl blur. She is both becoming and fact.
A rancor defines the split. Rip into. Flatten the depth of voice. That
urgent flex peels off the steady layers. A girl, I say.
Girl. Gu-erl. Quell. He. He—unbuttons before emergence.
As in yard rake pressed to roof of mouth. A fragrant rod.
Suh—sssuh—ssuck. Insistence. Lips go lisp. Our brutish boy.
Having not ever been whole. Or simple. Or young. Just split and open.
Not of it. For it. Born a cog of hard wheel at five, six, seven . . .
What to know of what has never been?
2.
No common place would do: bar stool, front porch, sea rock.
Such a room should crawl into the soul. Stretch it. Contort it.
Could be the straddle of this stranger at the neck. I am this.
She does not waver. She is twenty-five. The bed is wet. As many
as had done this thing before. The wound is rupture. Blood-faced.
Between sailing and anchor. No, between shipwreck and burial.
What does the mouth do? It does not mean no, saying no.
It does not mean yes. It gurgles. It swells. It is comfort.
A quick kick. Mighty, mighty.
June Jordan
Poem for Haruko
2005
I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain
or happiness
like candles lighting the entire soft lace
of the air
around the full length of your hair/a shower
organized by God
in brown and auburn
undulations luminous like particles
of flame
But now I do
retrieve an afternoon of apricots
and water interspersed with cigarettes
and sand and rocks
we walked across:
How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world
Now I do
relive an evening of retreat
a bridge I left behind
where all the solid heat
of lust and tender trembling
lay as cruel and as kind
as passion spins its infinite
tergiversations in between the bitter
and the sweet
Alone and longing for you
now I do
Megan Falley
K
2014
In the summer, girls paid her
in cigarettes and hickeys
to shave their heads
on her front porch.
I sat behind her in poetry class
and when she wrote the naked lady
tattooed on her arm writhed.
I tried to name the shade of her hair —
so black it was blue.
She loved Bukowski. Hated herself
in the most beautiful ways — pierced
five or six holes in her face.
One day in class she stole my phone,
punched her number in and saved her name — “k”.
She owned 1/26 of the alphabet.
I read her messages over and over.
They were the first poems.
They were cave paintings.
They were my own palms.
The only time she ever called was 3AM.
I WANT TO KISS YOU RIGHT NOW said her whiskey.
Don’t worry, that’s just something
she tells new friends said her roommate, sober,
snatching the phone.
The world had never given me
the language to say Come close or Yes or I don’t know
how to touch you, let me touch you—so I danced
with a boy that night. He was tall, I think.
I slept beside him, not touching, forgot
his name. But I remembered her hair,
bruise colored. How the dye left a spot
behind her ear. How it ruined nothing
but me.
The Day Amanda Realized She Was A Lesbian
2014
she pulled me into the laundry room,
mascara spilling down her graduation dress.
Her High School sweetheart — a lover
of Pearl Jam, hockey and monogamy — clueless
on the other side of the door.
I asked why she waited until graduation
to become a lesbian when we spent the past four years
at a liberal arts college known for its Kombucha and girls
braiding each other’s armpit hair on the Ultimate Frisbee Quad.
We’d done everything together: dyed our hair the same
shade of Manic Panic. Guarded the door for each other while touching
strange men in bar bathrooms. Told the same tequila secrets
to the same plastic wastebaskets. Shared a twin bed.
We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry — but I held her
the way I always held her.
How could we not have known?
I slid down the snowy hill on a dining hall lunch tray
only after she braved it. She chewed the mushroom stem
only after I swallowed mine.
We unlocked each other
like middle school diaries,
and so I called the girl
whose green eyes followed me across campus
for seven semesters and say Take me
somewhere
and in the garden, she kissed me
so soft, I grew
a new eyelash.
Karen Brodine
They Outlawed Touch
1990
They outlawed touch between those of the same body,
no twins, no sisters, no friends, no neighbors
an oddity, the way I wash my hair, the way
I bare my teeth?
get used to that word, perverse
you might as well get used
to spit in your face
and know pacific as an ocean
just some innocent ocean
get used to flaunting
your fists
reach across wall, ice, lock, myth
across lies we don’t exist
while a candidate swears on a Bible he’s no queer
I never knew what I was till I knew my name.
Dyke.
Lesbiana, the young girls jeer
and I know there must be one among them
swinging her skirts brashly
hearing her own name,
seeing herself
in me,
and I have loud names for this,
burnt kiss, singe
risk, pride
stronger tendon
tender
grin
fist hand human natural animal hand.
Drawing the Line1990
1.Firing Line
Notice of Proposed Removal ActionLoyalty Board
Post Office Department, Washington D.C.In the Matter of the Loyalty of Harriet M. PierceSeattle, Washington Loyalty Case Number 6
Executive Order 9835, March 21, 1948established a Federal Employees Loyalty Programto see that disloyal civilian officers or employeesare not retained.
As the result of a recent investigationmade of you as an employee of the Post Office
information has been receivedwhich indicates you have beenand that you are
affiliated or sympathetic with
an organization, association, movement, group
or combination of persons
designated as subversive
and on the basis of this evidence
grounds exist
for belief
that you are disloyal
to the Government of the United States
2. Holding the Line
We have lists
of those who stepped
across that line
to join us.
A piece of paper.
A simple list
of our party,
movement,
association,
group,
and combination of persons.
The names are the names
of those who stepped
across that line
to join us.
We stand in lines that stretch beyond
the law.
We march and are arrested.
We do not let the right wing
break our lines.
We say we have the right
to freedom of speech
to freedom of silence.
We say what we know
to be truth for the record.
We refuse to name names.
Subversive we shove back.
Loyal, we hold in trust
each name given.
It is that difficult
and that simple. |
Beth Brant
Her Name is Helen
1988
When she was laid off from the factory she got a job in a bar,
serving up shots and beer.
Instead of tips, she gets presents from her customers.
Little wooden statues of Indians in headdress.
Naked pictures of squaws with braided hair.
Feather roach clips in fuschia and chartreuse.
Everybody loves Helen…
She’s had lots of girlfriends.
White women who wanted to take care of her,
who liked Indians,
who think she’s a tragedy…
Her girlfriends took care of her.
Told her what to say
how to act more like an Indian.
You should be proud of your Indian heritage.
Wear more jewelry.
Go to the Indian Center.
Jean Smith
Boom Boom Boom
Oh ya and weirdly
the last song I wrote —
off the top of my head on Wednesday
is about a Vietnamese woman about my age
who swims over to me in the hot pool
to tell me a bunch of things — I get this quite a lot
people tell me things
She’s telling me about being a small child
walking through the jungle for a long time
there are dead people everywhere
and “boom-boom-boom”
she makes her arms straight
like guns on planes pointing down
her face a fierce frown
She doesn’t say the word war
she calls it “boom boom boom”
they are leaving because of
“boom boom boom”
it’s like she’s back into child-thought
I get the impression some people
don’t want to listen
and the more she senses
that I am listening
the more she has to say
She looks at my arms
saying I am so strong and she is too skinny
and I can tell she wants to touch me
looking for a place to just touch me
as she tells me about
walking in the jungle with seven brothers and sisters
she holds up nine fingers when she says seven
and she tells me it’s great
that I understand her English
because other people say
they can’t
I say, “Your English is fine — they don’t want to listen.”
And it seems like a relief
that someone says this
and she tells me that she’s been here all these years
and never gone back
never wanted to go back
until she got word that her father was going to die
I ask if she’d been one of the Boat People
that came to Canada and I make a gesture
with two fingers skimming the surface of the hot pool
and say, “Boat People” and she get its
and I feel like I’ve just invented
the universal gesture for Boat People
— weird little thought —
She applied for a passport and they
phoned her at home
and asked her too many questions
and she’d started to cry
she makes the universal gesture for crying
two fingers down her cheek from the corner of her eye
They gave her the passport but her father died —
there wouldn’t have been enough time to get there
So she thinks she’ll take a trip to Seattle instead
I laugh and we we introduce ourselves by name
As I turn away to move through the water
I reach back to where her tiny hand is
floating in front of her
I take her hand for a second
while our eyes aren’t on each other
a separate connection is made
Cathy Linh Che
2014
The German word for dream is traume.
The coal-dust hushed
parameters of the room.
Outside, my mother stitched
whole dresses for $3.00 a piece.
I slept in a bedroom
which faced the street.
A cheerleader was killed
in a drive-by that year.
She died in her sleep.
I watched the headlights
sweep overhead.
*
It felt like skin.
It did not
feel obscene.
When that boy
tongue-kissed me
and wiped
his mouth,
it was a coming
into knowledge.
*
When my mother whispered,
Has anyone touched you there?
I had to pick.
Alan, I said.
I was seven.
The training wheels
were coming off.
Between the couch
and wall, the ceiling was white
with popcorn bits. The boys stood
and watched. I lay there,
my eyes open like a doll’s.
Someone said, Let me try.
He pulled down his pants
and rode on top. The boys laughed,
said shhh, and stood me up.
Suheir Hammad
4:02 p.m.
poem supposed to be about
one minute and the lives of three women in it
writing it and up
the block a woman killed
by her husband
poem now about one minute
and the lives of four women
in it
haitian mother
she walks through
town carrying her son’s
head—banging it against
her thigh calling out
creole come see, see what
they’ve done to my flesh
holds on to him grip tight
through hair wool
his head all that’s
left of her
in tunisia
she folds pay up into stocking
washes his european semen
off her head
hands her heart to god
and this month’s rent to mother
sings berber the gold
haired one favored me, rode
and ripped my flesh, i now
have food to eat
brooklyn lover
stumbles—streets ragged under sneakers
she carries her heart
banged up against
thighs crying ghetto
look, look what’s been done with
my flesh, my trust, humanity,
somebody tell me
something good
Isabella Matambanadzo
Black Granite
2010
That year, her grades dropped. It wasn’t a gentle decline. She went
from always being one of the three top performers across all her
subjects to hedging with failure. Because she didn’t loose her
unbending cheer, or fall off her sports teams, the teachers misread
her. Report cards would go home with the words “bad set of friends”
scrawled all over them, or “teenage tantrums” in the case of teachers
who thought they should have had a prestigious career in the world of
Psychology, rather than rub chalk off their fingers with damp cloths
at the end of a 45 minute class period.
Not wanting to worsen her situation or call attention to the real
reasons for her disruption, she kept quiet. Her mother would badger
her about the;
“49 % in mathematics”
“50% in physics”
“48% in biology”,
finger running over the rows and columns filled with teacher’s script. Later, when she learnt how to use a computer, she
wondered at why there was no font called “Teacher”. Some geek had made
a big mistake there: Cartoon, Times New Roman, but no Teacher….
Strange for sure.
“I am doing my very best Ma”, was her thoughtful, respectful reply.
“O’ Levels are so much tougher than the junior certificate”. She
didn’t want to further fray any already torn nerves. Her mother had
that distracted way about her today. A storm was already gathering in
the corners of her eyes. If pressed, there would be an unbearable gush
of salty blobs of sadness and rage.
Her parents were fighting. Not the verbal assaults she heard Sue-Ellen
and J.R. hurl at each over the radio versions of Dallas and Dynasty.
Their television set had long been sold off to pay debts that had been
raised by a truant uncle. Ever the faithful head of the family, they
had been underwritten with the surety of her father’s name. Her
mother was fury itself. She had bought their first colour TV with her
own pay cheque. Money saved in the cup of her bra, with the elastic on
the left strap drawn tight to ensure the special loot didn’t slither.
How could that lout of a mean ass brother-in-law do this to her and
the kids? But the laws of the land did not allow women to own property
so it had been purchased in her father’s name. And now the Collector
of Debts had stood in the family home as if presiding over an auction.
Clipboard in hand and hip thrust out in a posture of false efficiency,
he had taken her TV set.
It was an outright brawl. Blows and blood. Her school friends talked
openly about their parents’ fights. They spoke of well-educated
fathers having affairs with old flames that had returned home from
England in the aftermath of independence deft on reclaiming their
rightful place as his original love, his true soul mate. Men who had
been sent to school by wives who took any job, every job that would
pay, and in the process sacrificed their own career dreams. She never
said a word.
That was what freedom meant. Smokey voices coming over the telephone
line at home asking “is your father in?” “ In you maybe”, was the
answer she wanted to give. But she had been raised polite, so she said
with diplomacy. “I am very sorry, no. May I take your name and number
and ask him to ring you back please?”.
“Umm-haa,” the voice exhaled, suppressing a mist of tobacco soot. The
telephone would click dead but she’d stay on the line, reached for the
message pad and pen nodding into nothingness. “ You are welcome”, she
said to the dumb drone in her ear. Anything less would have flared her
watchful mother to respond. It was pointless really, to add fuel to an
already blazing fire.
Her world had become a private war zone, punctuated by the gruff
staccato of a dress ripping as roughness grabbed the sleeve in combat.
From the battlefield, she would retrieve and stitch back together
amputated clothes. No matter how hard she scrubbed, she could never
quite get the spotting out of the chipped butter cup yellow tiles in
the kitchen walls. When they had bought the family home in the suburbs
newly opened to blacks at independence in the multiracial
neighbourhoods the granite topped counters were a major selling point
for the agent. “Quick sale this, owners are packed and want to leave
the country. It has gone to the dogs, hey. They are off to Australia,”
the sales agent rattled on in a raspy English that reminded her of the
sound of a knife slicing lemons for the gin and tonics.
Over the years, the granite had cracked. The smack of the butt of the
axe had left a birthmark. She had ducked its wood cutting blow but the
bottle of cooking oil she held in her hand, between left thumb and
forefinger, had shattered her sure footedness. Her head hit the razor
sharp corner of the counter, and twisted her into a fall. The coroner,
a spindly specimen of a man, who wore tortoise shelled glasses that
were flanked by thick, grey eyebrows, said, in a dry, unemotional
tone, “it wasn’t the head injury that killed her, or the glass that
had pierced clean through her lung, to the top tip of her heart. The
most important muscle in her body had somehow calcified into a mass of
stone”. Only then did his brows move, perplexed by this impossible
puzzle of biology. He was itching to write a case-study. But the
family needed the body for the funeral.
Looking at the weather beaten tombstone over her mother’s grave. She
wanted, today, as she did everyday, to edit the ridiculous poetry of
the epitaph etched in curly, even letters.
R.I.P, Beloved
Sister,
Wife,
Mother, friend,
To “you should have left him and lived”.
Nellie Wong
Mama, come back
1986
Mama, come back.
Why did you leave
now that I am learning you?
The landlady next door
how she apologizes
for my rough brown skin
to her tenant from Hong Kong
as if I were her daughter,
as if she were you.
How do I say I miss you
your scolding
your presence
your roast loin of pork
more succulent, more tender
than any hotel chef’s?
The fur coat you wanted
making you look like a polar bear
and the mink-trimmed coat
I once surprised you
on Christmas morning.
Mama, how you said “importment”
for important,
your gold tooth flashing
an insecurity you dared not bare,
wanting recognition
simply as eating noodles
and riding in a motor car
to the supermarket
the movie theater
adorned in your gold and jade
as if all your jewelry
confirmed your identity
a Chinese woman in America.
How you said “you better”
always your last words
glazed through your dark eyes
following me fast as you could
one November evening in New York City
how I thought “Hello, Dolly!”
showed you an America
you never saw.
How your fear of being alone
kept me dutiful in body
resentful in mind.
How my fear of being single
kept me
from moving out.
How I begged your forgiveness
after that one big fight
how I wasn’t wrong
but needed you to love me
as warmly as you hugged strangers.
Cheryl Conway
BUT YOU LOOK SO GOOD
2008
Oh but you look so good, I heard them say.
Is that me you’re talking to? I thank them for the compliment, wishing I felt that way.
I wonder what that phrase is really suppose to mean?
I’m no Marilyn Monroe and certainly no beauty queen.
I’ll admit I’ve done fairly well, quite the actress I’ve become.
I try not to discuss my excruciating cranial nerves, or my legs that are often numb.
My family has witnessed the days in which I can hardly bear. Days when fatigue is so consuming,
I don’t bother to fix my hair. I’ll make it to the shower, a technique to hide the pain,
you can’t hear me crying and my tears are swallowed by the drain.
Days when I can’t budge and I feel frozen in one place. Of course, these are the days you won’t see my face.
I suspect when you see me out in public, I project a certain glow.
My good days are seldom now, but I’m truly sick you know?
I don’t know how to describe the symptoms of a disease still so misunderstood.
But, I still don’t mind hearing, “Oh, but you look so good.”
Renee Gladman
Proportion Surviving
2000
Long before the fresh apple crisis, my life had some form to it. I would wake in the mornings—I would perform something. For example, the day I tried, as one with acute passion might, to win one woman over but accidentally won another—that whole time I had been living like someone. Though I can’t remember his name. His model of optimism provided me with a certain geography that I inhabit in time of need. This time the need was surprising. People tend to have faith that the juice they drink in the morning is the same juice they have always drunk. And apples take their shape naturally. The guy, whose name escapes me now, taught me to look upon others’ concerns as mine to make at home. I was fond of doing many things at home, but my favorite was drinking juice. When my friends came by—they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning to force it on me—I had to tell them I was busy with my juice. Two weeks before the crisis, I had been writing some poems about it. It was a warm day, not entirely different from other warm days in San Francisco. People were on the street. Pale people were on the street, making it to the park and lying there such that the next day they were a little browned. The poems I had written were failures, but dense ones. It seemed appropriate to think the person’s attempt at wholeness was a series of missteps, which if drawn across an afternoon might prove interesting to other people. I had a way of reminding my friends that we were all in pain, but a fruit tart kind of pain strangers can’t help but enjoy. That day I had, in a sense, gathered all my possessions and gone out onto the street with them. I awoke that morning with an urgency to prepare myself for something—not anything life threatening, but definitely personal.
My lover, then, wanted to spend much of her life asleep. She had no ostensible reaction to the city’s sudden depletion of all its fresh apples and no hope for them. In a world where a person’s tastes revolve around the kind of sleep she gets, I could not find four people who cared. I thought that if I could find those four people we could really do something. A few of my friends pretended they were chosen. A few neighbors felt bad and made offers. My mother called to console me. My lover—in actuality, the closest person to being a member of the encumbered troop, slept next to me. Sleep became our network: falling in and out of it for change. The rule of survival is that no two people can lie in the same bed and sleep at the same time. So I kept an eye on her and played this game of freshness. If by morning I could quickly run out and do seven things that did not involve longing, she would reward me. Before the crisis, the reward would have needed only to be an apple one. But after the apples were gone. The landscape usually contains the solution to what’s lost. Demographics help people in cars. Some people did not notice me. Some demographers lose sleep and do not notice me. That was two days before. The evening before it was two days before the crisis, I was thinking that I did not think I was asleep. I had been watching the sunlight take the corner of my room and my housemate’s cat in it. When I looked again, there was no light—but I had not been asleep. It’s the way people react to traumatic events. They say, “I had just been there” or will say, “She was just with me.” So the loss of light was emotional and the lost state—demographic. I began to trace things by their disappearance. Alone in the room, my memory, and anticipated darkness going for light. People like to talk about the daytime. People in strange moods often miss the daytime. Before the crisis it was not often that one would find me in strange moods. I had managed a particular kind of balance fortified by a certain satisfaction of taste. I was happy. I mean, I was in my juice.
Five weeks before the crisis, I was employed at the natural foods grocery around the corner from my house. I did not really work there, but I went there every week. All but the third Sunday of each month, I would walk in and find all kinds of juice on sale. Not to buy, but to stand next to. Shorter people have the privilege of proximity to most cardboard signs. That was one thing. I would stand there and be something for taller people who couldn’t see. I had gotten into the habit of improvised customer service as a way to peruse the juice aisles without being noticed. My parents thought my talents should have led me somewhere. My father would always say, “If you’re not going to be a people person, then numbers will have to do.” He was surprised that with all the time I had on my hands, I chose to spend most of it alone. Numbers then did hold some mystery for me, but mostly too high and far-reaching to explore. For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed. My decision to drink only fresh juice, which costs as much as a small satisfying breakfast, kept me busy rounding up cash. I would have to leave most friendships behind. As a way of keeping my life “wall-free,” I had to divide my time. I would spend the first part of the day searching for volunteer positions in organic juice factories. The second part of my day I would spend telling people about the first part. The other parts are not of substance here.
Twenty-five years before the crisis I had for the first time what would eventually become known to me as apple juice. Twenty-three years later a magazine editor would reject my first attempt to recount that experience in litany. I am always drinking in my poems, a good friend says.
In the first years of my life, everything I ate was mush. Today I will tolerate only the toughest of green vegetables and date people who will always forget this. When I had that remarkable glass of apple juice, I had no idea that one day I simply would not be able to find it. The city gets rid of its apples. People find themselves inventing fruit. The day I decided to write poems about it—it was twelve days before the rumors began and fourteen days before the media coverage—I had been resting in my best friend’s easy chair. We were discussing the rise of the smoothie industry when something fantastic occurred to me. Five days later I had twenty poems. When a person writes a poem about her passions, people on the street are bound to notice them. The passions overwhelm the body. She carries the body as though it were the book. The friend whose easy chair gave way to my failures moved out of town the next week, and though I miss her it was the failures that saved me. On every other day any kind of crisis one finds particular sayings helpful. If certain words are spoken quietly into a cup of hot water, with the handle of the cup turned toward the wall, whatever strength found in the person may be mirrored in the wall. The person leaves the house with her hand against this wall but strutting slightly.
In the alley behind the natural foods grocery, I met my second lover for the first time. Meeting people in vulnerable places accentuates the passion later. Or it may be so hot that the lover never thinks in the present. And the weather was so hot during the crisis. Only the alleys had shade. Forty-eight days into the crisis, while on a thirst strike, I had to make a run for the alley. Not as though people were after me, but the elements. The foundation of anyone feeling that they must get away is need; at the bottom of any body-based need is grace. When I appeared at the opening of the alley, a woman who not twenty-four hours later would be dozing in my bed was stacking crates against the east-side wall. Women who work against surfaces inspire me to do things—I thought about telling her, or—short women make me want things. All the time while I was growing up I put a lot of demands on my juice; forty-eight days into the crisis she made me forget it. I did not forget it, but was embroiled. The newspapers were saying things about the past. People were celebrating thick juice, and I kept writing those poems. That day in the alley I realized three things about life. While assisting her I learned three things to carry around with me, to disperse when needed. For six months during the crisis, I did not care about the crisis.
When my faith returned all my lovers were gone. That morning I woke to the two hundred and thirty-second day of the crisis; I was beneath my bed. It was the sixth day that I had awakened beneath my bed. I was lonely, but I was also sure. Life without juice had taken on the name and shape of my weakest character, who—when we passed on the street—did not know me. I knew it was me by the way my head felt: people find themselves in an idea and feel so specified by the idea that they are compelled to show it. Today all my ideas are liquid. That day of my faith, friends thinking I was sick came by to see me. It would be the last day I spent alone; I was happy, but still would not drink. The juice on my mind was no longer juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it became familiar. I did not want to drink it.
Marilyn Chin
The Survivor
1994
Don’t tap your chopsticks against your bowl.
Don’t throw your teacup against the wall in anger.
Don’t suck on your long black braid and weep.
Don’t tarry around the big red sign that says
“danger!”
All the tempests will render still; seas will calm,
horses will retreat, voices to surrender.
That you have this way and not that,
that your skin is yellow, not white, not black,
that you were born not a boychild but a girl,
that this world will be forever puce-pink are just as well.
Remember, the survivor is not the strongest or
most clever;
merely, the survivor is almost always the youngest.
And you shall have to relinguish that title
before long.
Nicole Brossard
From Shadow Soft et Soif, translated by Guy Bennett
90s
hold on in silence
at dawn the verb to be courses
in the veins, a heavenly body, it flies
as after love or grain of salt
on the tongue early morning, taste of immensity
it draws near
the first dampness
come kiss me
think of the great power of water
that makes a place of us
and if torment if what quickens
your nights of reading and irreality
si la poussière vivre sur tes doigts
lean back on shadow
in a place with blue and emptiness
there will surely be water in your eyes
modernity and fear in your clothes
Muriel Rukeyser
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
1968
This has nothing
to do with
propagating
The
species
is continued
as so many are
(among
the smaller creatures)
by fission
(and this species
is very small
next in order to
the amoeba, the beginning one)
The paramecium
achieves, then,
immortality
by dividing
But when
the paramecium
desires renewal
strength another joy
this is what
the paramecium does:
The paramecium
lies down beside
another paramecium
Slowly inexplicably
the exchange
takes place
in which
some bits
of the nucleus of each
are exchanged
for some bits
of the nucleus
of the other
This is called
the conjugation of the paramecium.
Gertrude Stein
Love Song of Alice B.
1921
I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handkerchiefs and kisses.
She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me.
In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I.
In looking at the sun she read a map. And so did I.
In eating fish and pork she just grew fat. And so did I.
In loving a blue sea she had a pain. And so did I.
In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I.
How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love.
How often do we need trees and hills. Not often.
And how often do we need birds. Not often.
And how often do we need wishes. Not often.
And how often do we need glasses not often.
We drink wine and we make well we have not made it yet.
How often do we need a kiss. Very often and we add when tenderness overwhelms us we speedily eat veal.
And what else, ham and a little pork and raw artichokes and ripe olives and chester cheese and cakes and caramels and all the melon. We still have a great deal of it left. I wonder where it is. Conserved melon. Let me offer it to you.
Marge Piercy
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
1997
The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
She is manufactured like a sports sedan.
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade.
Cecile had been seduction itself in college.
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,
her hips and ass promising, her mouth pursed
in the dark red lipstick of desire.
She visited in ’68 still wearing skirts
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick,
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt,
lipstick pale as apricot milk,
hair loose as a horse’s mane. Oh dear,
I thought in my superiority of the moment,
whatever has happened to poor Cecile?
She was out of fashion, out of the game,
disqualified, disdained, dis-
membered from the club of desire.
Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th century:
century of the ultimate lady
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting.
Paniers bring her hips out three feet
each way, while the waist is pinched
and the belly flattened under wood.
The breasts are stuffed up and out
offered like apples in a bowl.
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper
never meant for walking.
On top is a grandiose headache:
hair like a museum piece, daily
ornamented with ribbons, vases,
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy
of a hairdresser turned loose.
The hats were rococo wedding cakes
that would dim the Las Vegas strip.
Here is a woman forced into shape
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:
a woman made of pain.
How superior we are now: see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors.
She runs on a treadmill every morning,
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt,
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles,
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food
hungry, always hungry:
a woman made of pain.
A cat or dog approaches another,
they sniff noses. They sniff asses.
They bristle or lick. They fall
in love as often as we do,
as passionately. But they fall
in love or lust with furry flesh,
not hoop skirts or push up bras
rib removal or liposuction.
It is not for male or female dogs
that poodles are clipped
to topiary hedges.
If only we could like each other raw.
If only we could love ourselves
like healthy babies burbling in our arms.
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed
to need what is sold us.
Why should we want to live inside ads?
Why should we want to scourge our softness
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting?
Why should we punish each other with scorn
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?
When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?
Grace Nichols
selection Ffrom Weeping Woman
(Dora Maar)
Pablo Picasso (1937), 2009
2
Even my hat mocks me
laughing
on the inside of my grief –
My twisted mouth
and gnashing teeth,
my fingers fat and clumsy
as if they were still wearing
those gloves –
the bloodstained ones you keep.
What has happened
to the pupils
of my eyes, Picasso?
Why do I deserve
such deformity?
What am I now
if not a cross between
a clown and a broken
piece of crockery?
3
But I am famous.
People recognise me
despite my fractures.
I’m no Mona Lisa
(how I’d like to wipe
the smugness from her face
that still captivates.)
Doesn’t she know that art, great art,
needn’t be an oil-painting?
I am a magnet
not devoid of beauty.
I am an icon
of twentieth-century grief.
A symbol
of compositional possibilities
My tears are tears of happiness –
big rolling diamonds.
14
Picasso, I want my face back
the unbroken photography of it
Once I lived to be stroked
by the fingers of your brushes
Now I see I was more an accomplice
to my own unrooting
Watching the pundits gaze
open-mouthed at your masterpieces
While I hovered like a battered muse
my private grief made public.
15
Dora, Theodora, be reasonable, if it weren’t for Picasso
you’d hardly be remembered at all.
He’s given you an unbelievable shelf-life.
Yes, but who will remember the fruits of my own life?
I am no moth flitting around his wick.
He might be a genius but he’s also a prick –
Medusa, Cleopatra, help me find my inner bitch,
wasn’t I christened Henriette Theodora Markovitch?
Picasso, I want my face back
the unbroken geography of it.
Aditi Rao
Not being a man, I bleed like this
I remember only the wet earth, after a flood or a pipe-burst, grey soil
growing red, its greedy drinking. I remember the stickiness of my soles.
Yesterday, a man boarded the subway, smelling of mountains and chalk-dust.
Five centuries ago, he did not understand his neighbors; they seemed to
want to give. Five centuries later, he thinks I want room in his bed.
Don’t you see the spiders crawling up my bones?
. Mejor sola.
Cotton whirring into thread, clunking
into cloth – this is how I’ve spun for centuries. This
is how we drove the Brits out. Thread by thread, look.
. I watch the tourist who wants to pity me, silver smiles
. barely hiding his fear of a fingerless palm. I know
. the power of dismemberment.
This back has carried wood, water, children, stories,
the shock of orange against pink, sounds
of roosters and broken bus-horns. In years
of wandering, it has never seen beige.
Why are you hiding from color?
I am not afraid of disfigured children
that are not mine. Therefore,
I may never give birth.
. (I forgot an arm in a village, a lip across the border,
. dropped an ear in an ocean. Forgot. Remembered.)
. I will begin as I always have – again.
I remember a pebbled earth.
I delivered my first child with my socks on, so they wouldn’t see
my wounds. It was a hospital for healthy people.
Her voice grew loud inside her
stomach, exploded one day, shattered
the wall, took root with the banyan.
We have all tried rolling it back
into her throat. It has steadily refused.
. How will I live now? In her memory.
. One foot in the air, another in the soil
. where the graves are. Dancing
. with the world between my legs.
. My songs tied into bundles, set adrift
. on rivers, like children nobody wants.
On the highway, sitting ghoda-taang on the motorcycle
behind the man I love – no one to notice. Closer
to the village, side-saddle. A woman you can trust
to educate your daughters. I will live in between.
Gloria Anzaldúa
“To live in the Borderlands means you”…
(1987)
are neither hispana india negra española
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from;
To live in the Borderlands means knowing
that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
that mexicanas call you rajetas,
that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;
Cuando vives in la frontera
people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,
you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and half—both woman and man, neither—
a new gender;
To live in the Borderlands means to
put chile in the borscht,
eat whole wheat tortillas,
speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;
Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to
resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,
the pull of the gun barrel,
the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;
In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have shattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;
To live in the Borderlands means
the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you roll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;
To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.
gabacha: a Chicano term for a white woman
rajetas: literally, “split,” that is, having betrayed your word
burra: donkey
buey: oxen
sin fronteras: without borders
Tishani Doshi
The River of Girls
2012
i.m. India’s missing girls
This is not really myth or secret.
This murmur in the mouth
of the mountain where the sound
of rain is born. This surging
past pilgrim town and village well.
This coin-thin vagina
and acid stain of bone.
This doctor with his rusty tools,
this street cleaner, this mother
laying down the bloody offerings
of birth. This is not the cry
of a beginning, or a river
buried in the bowels of the earth.
This is the sound of ten million girls
singing of a time in the universe
when they were born with tigers
breathing between their thighs;
when they set out for battle
with all three eyes on fire,
their golden breasts held high
like weapons to the sky.
Sina Queyras
Endless Inter-States
2009
1
They go down to the expressways, baskets
In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels
And watering cans, they go down to pick
Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down
In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing
By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those
Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down
Remembering the glide of automobiles, the
Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching,
Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s
In the trunk of the car. They go down, past
The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport
Soil from deep in the earth, and are content
To have the day before them, are content to imagine
Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures
Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of
Plant life, sustainable abundance,
An idea of sufficient that is global. Or,
Because cars now move on rails underground,
The elevated roads are covered in earth,
Vines drape around belts of green, snake
Through cities, overgrown and teeming
With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall
Of our own devising, and the night
Watchmen with their machine guns
Keeping humans, the intoxicated,
Out. I am sorry for this version, offer
You coffee, hot while there is still
Coffee this far north, while there is still news
To wake up to, and seasons
Vaguely reminiscent of seasons.
2
Web-toed she walks into the land, fins
Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation
A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau,
Quaint, at least that is my dream of her,
Big shouldered, out there daydreaming
The world into existence, pleasuring herself
With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake
But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping
In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by
Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she
Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries
To reattach things, but why? What if the world
Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing?
She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets
Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling
Itself on to the next.
3
Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless.
She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is
Always picking up after someone. But what? What
Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus
Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing
Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and
Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns,
Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out,
Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers
In the knotted oak, classic movies run on
The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred
Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over,
She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular,
Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a
Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked.
It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature
Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl
Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal
Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death
As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned.
Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic
Self and sees mariners floating, Ben
Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting
From the river bank, planked skirts on Front,
China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic
Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good.
Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching
Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move
Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other
Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities.
4
Abondoned mine shafts on either side, those
Tight curves between Kaslo and New Denver,
Hairpin at glacial creek, splash of red
Bellies muscling, streaming up, we see them
From the open window. Or once did. Even here?
Salmon stocks diminish, mammals dying off.
No, he said, not in your lifetime. Vertical;
Traces where the charge went off,
Ruggedness is your only defence, he
Said, be difficult to cultivate, navigate. Offer
No hint of paradise, no whiff of
Golf course. Uninhabitability your only
Recourse. Lashed, that moment, prolonged
Leaving, her father on the roadside
Dreaming his world fitting in some place,
Without being reigned in, her father’s fathers
Throwing rocks down on Hannibal,
Straddling the last large elm in the valley,
Knowing where and how to lay the charge, or
Sucking shrapnel from an open wound,
The lambs all around, bleating.
5
Which liftetime? Beyond what brawn? Who
Knew where the road would take us?
Neat, neat, the rows of apple trees
There in the valley, red summers, the heat
Of Quebecois pickers, VWs in a circle,
Firepit and strum. Men from Thetford
Mines dreaming peaches, dreaming
Clean soil. Hour upon hour the self
Becomes less aware of the self.
Beautiful, beautiful, the centre line, the road,
This power station and control tower, these
Weigh scales, these curves, that mountain
Goat, those cut lines, these rail lines, that
Canyon, the Fraser, the Thompson,
The old highways hyphenating
Sagebrush, dead-ending on chain
Link, old cars collecting like bugs
On the roadside, overturned, curled, astute,
Memory of the Overlanders,
Optimism, headlong into
Hell’s Gate. Churn of now,
The sound barriers, the steering
Wheel, the gas pedal, the gearshift,
The dice dangling, fuzzy,
Teal, dual ashtrays, AM radio
Tuned to CBC, no draft, six cylinders,
The gas tank, the gearshift, easing
Into the sweet spot behind
The semi, flying through Roger’s
Pass; the snowplow, the Park
Pass, sun on mud flap, the rest stop
Rock slides, glint of snow, the runaway
Lanes, the grades steep as skyscrapers,
The road cutting through cities,
Slicing towns, dividing parks,
The road over lakes, under rivers,
The road right through a redwood,
Driving on top of cities, all eyes
On the DVD screen,
All minds on the cellphone,
The safari not around, but inside
Us: that which fuels.
6
No matter, the slither of pavement is endless,
Today the rain, a gold standard, all the
Earmarks of, never mind, all is well, all
Is well, and who doesn’t want to hear that?
She gets on her scooter and roars, she gets
On her skateboard and feels the air under
Foot, she shakes out her hair, thinking of California,
Thinking of allergies, thinking of the wreck
Of place: who ever promised more? The iris
With its feigned restraint, the daring tuba,
The horn of shoe, utilitarian, delicate. Such
Useful domesticity, such hopeful electronics.
Once she disappeared by turning sideways.
Now she finds it difficult to reappear. She lifts
The sediment of time to her palm, feels it sift
Between her fingers: bone, bits of event. Aren’t
We all a bit fluish this century? Nothing bearing any
Mark of otherwise. No prescript, nothing a bit of hope
Won’t cure. Such a churn of optimism:
That which consecrates will not kill. Maybe New York?
She fits herself on an easterly course: been done,
Been done, but what better than the well-trodden
Path? Beautiful, beautiful, the seams
Of the rich, their folded linens,
Their soft bags of money. If it ain’t broke
Don’t fix, if it ain’t resistant, don’t
Wince, if it fits like a boot, then boot it.
And so she does.
Mitsuye Yamada
| Neutralize!for Silvia, Alejandrina, and Susan1996. . . poetry . . .has been my spiritual guidethroughout my incarcerationin the darkest of timesI turn to Neruda and Hikmetand Rukeyser and Ritsas
and Chrytos
and Whitman. . .
(Excerpt from a letter by a U.S. Political Prisoner)
They mean to kill
the soul in me
Neutralize!
White white
no poetry in
white floors walls ceiling white
white chairs tables sink white
only when I close my eyes do I see
beyond the white windowless walls
springtime of lacy trees
green against baby blue.
There is silence silence more
silence
to drown out the silence
I fill my inner ear with robinsongs
human screeches and scrapes
sounds bouncing against the white walls?
Dead air in the cell
in my mind
the zest of lemon
and the sweetness of wildflowers.
Willfully bland diet aimed
to erase use of my tongue
Add a pinch of salt with the taste
of sweat or even of blood
anywhere on my body
the taste of cheese.
One human touch
my own arms enfold me
my fingers move over my sagging breasts
my nipples and soft parts of my body
Neutralize! |
Fahmida Riaz
Chadur and Char-diwari
Sire! What use is this black chadur to me?
A thousand mercies, why do you reward me with this?
I am not in mourning that I should wear this
To flag my grief to the world
I am not a disease that needs to be drowned in secret darkness
I am not a sinner nor a criminal
That I should stamp my forehead with its darkness
If you will not consider me too impudent
If you promise that you will spare my life
I beg to submit in all humility
O Master of men!
In your highness’ fragrant chambers
lies a dead body
Who knows how long it has been rotting?
It seeks pity from you
Sire, do be so kind
Do not give me this black chadur
With this black chadur cover the shroudless body
lying in your chamber
For the stench that emanates from this body
Walks buffed and breathless in every alleyway
Bangs her head on every doorframe
Covering her nakedness
Listen to her heart rending screams
Which raise strange spectre
That remain naked in spite of their chadur.
Who are they ? You must know them ,Sire.
Your highness must recognise them
These are the hand – maidens
The hostages who are halal for the night
With the breath of morning they become homeless
They are the slaves who are above
The half-share of inheritance for your
Highness’s off-spring.
These are the Bibis
Who wait to fulfill their vows of marriage
In turn, as they stand , row upon row
They are the maidens,
On whose heads , when your highness laid a hand
of paternal affection,
The blood of their innocent youth stained the
whiteness of your beard with red
In your fragrant chamber , tears of blood,
life itself has shed
Where this carcass has lain
For long centuries, this body spectacle of the murder
of humanity.
Bring this show to an end now
Sire, cover it up now
Not I, but you need this chadur now.
For my person is not merely a symbol of your lust:
Across the highways of life , sparkles my intelligence
If a bead of sweat sparkles on the earth’s brow it is
my diligence.
These four walls , this chadur I wish upon the
rotting carcass.
In the open air, her sails flapping , races ahead
my ship.
I am the companion of the New Adam
Who has earned my self-assured love.
[Translated from Urdu by Rukhsana Ahmed]
Suheir Hammad
What I Will
2007
I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin beak for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain’t
louder than this breath.
Pussy Riot
Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest by Pussy Riot
The joyful science of occupying squares
The will to everyone’s power, without damn leaders
Direct action—the future of mankind!
LGBT, feminists, defend the nation!
Death to prison, freedom to protest!
Make the cops serve freedom,
Protests bring on good weather
Occupy the square, do a peaceful takeover
Take the guns from all the cops
Death to prison, freedom to protest!
Fill the city, all the squares and streets,
There are many in Russia, beat it,
Open all the doors, take off the epaulettes
Come taste freedom together with us
Death to prison, freedom to protest!
Maria Aloykhina (member of Pussy Riot)
In Light of Current Events
2011
Bad things aren’t scary to do; everyone does them.
It’s not hard to hide in a crowd, no one will notice.
One piece of trash more, one piece less.
What’s there to be said—it’s the times we live in, they’re like that.
We got unlucky. But, no.
You cannot be afraid or ashamed to do good.
You cannot.
There’s so frighteningly little of that around these days.
Cynicism’s in fashion.
Ironic smiles and dull melancholy.
Know this: if you don’t do it, possibly, no one will.
A lot of them just don’t have the time to look at what they’re doing, let alone the time to take stock.
They have time to look at others, they have time to assign blame.
If you choose to do good, if you choose to help come what may, know this: you have lost.
You have most certainly lost.
But this doesn’t mean that you mustn’t do it.
It is important to remember who we are.
It is important to know that your conscience is what matters.
It is important to follow your conscience.
It is important not so much to change things, but to know that you are changing them.
Ntozake Shange
With No Immediate Cause
every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a
woman is raped/every ten minutes
a lil girl is molested
yet i rode the subway today
i sat next to an old man who
may have beaten his old wife
3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago
he might have sodomized his
daughter but i sat there
cuz the young men on the train
might beat some young women
later in the day or tomorrow
i might not shut my door fast
every 3 minutes it happens
some woman’s innocence
rushes to her cheeks/pours from her mouth
like the betsy wetsy dolls have been torn
apart/their mouths
menses red & split/every
three minutes a shoulder
is jammed through plaster and the oven door/
chairs push thru the rib cage/hot water or
boiling sperm decorate her body
i rode the subway today
& bought a paper from a
man who might
have held his old lady onto
a hot pressing iron/i don’t know
maybe he catches lil girls in the
park & rips open their behinds
with steel rods/i can’t decide
what he might have done i only
know every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes every 10 minutes/so
i bought the paper
looking for the announcement
the discovery/of the dismembered
woman’s body/the
victims have not all been
identified/today they are
naked and dead/refuse to
testify/one girl out of 10′s not
coherent/i took the coffee
& spit it up/i found an
announcement/not the woman’s
bloated body in the river/floating
not the child bleeding in the
59th street corridor/not the baby
broken on the floor/
there is some concern
that alleged battered women
might start to murder their
husbands & lovers with no
immediate cause”
i spit up i vomit i am screaming
we all have immediate cause
every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes
every 10 minutes
every day
women’s bodies are found
in alleys & bedrooms/at the top of the stairs
before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink
coffee/i must know/
have you hurt a woman today
did you beat a woman today
throw a child across a room
are the lil girl’s panties
in your pocket
did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establish
immediate cause
every three minutes
every five minutes
every ten minutes
every day.
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Red String
2003
At first she thought the lump in the road
was clay thrown up by a trucker’s wheel.
Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers:
Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring
at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats.
Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed
their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing.
It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowed
and turned to winter. It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn,
creatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land.
Beatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passed
as spirits. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded
themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock.
Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power
to split the earth open to release them. White-robed, faceless
horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water,
saying: We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight!
Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice
or limp or mended boots but said nothing, allowed the marchers
to pass on. Then they ran their skinny hounds to hunt other
lives down ravines, to save their skins another night from
the carrion beetles, spotted with red darker than blood,
who wait by the grave for the body’s return to the earth.
Some years the men killed scores, treed them in the sweetgums.
Watched a man’s face flicker in the purple-black leaves.
Then they burned the tree.
Smoke from their fires
still lay over the land where Beatrice traveled.
Out of this cloud the dead of the field spoke to her,
voices from the place where some voices never stop:
They took my boy down by Sucarnochee Creek.
He said, “Gentlemen, what have I done?”
They says, “Never mind what you have done.
We just want your damned heart.” After they
killed him, I built up a little fire and laid out
by him all night until the neighbors came
in the morning. I was standing there when
they killed him, down by Sucarnochee Creek.
I am a mighty brave woman, but I was getting
scared the way they were treating me, throwing rocks
on my house, coming in disguise. They come to my bed
where I was laying, and whipped me. They dragged me
out into the field so that the blood strung across
the house, and the fence, and the cotton patch,
in the road, and they ravished me. Then they went
back into my house and ate the food on the stove.
They have drove me from my home. It is over
by DeSotoville, on the other side in Choctaw.
I had informed of persons whom I saw
dressing in Ku Klux disguise;
had named the parties. At the time
I was divorced from Dr. Randall
and had a school near Fredonia.
About one month before the election
some young men about the county
came in the nighttime; they said
I was not a decent woman; also
I was teaching radical politics.
They whipped me with hickory withes.
The gashes cut through my thin dress,
through the abdominal wall.
I was thrown into a ravine
in a helpless condition. The school
closed after my death.
From the fog above the bloody entrails of the bird, the dead flew
toward Beatrice like the night crow whose one wing rests on the evening
while the other dusts off the morning star. They gave her such a look:
Child, what have you been up to while we
were trying to keep body and soul together?
But never mind that now. Here’s what you must do:
Tie a red flannel string around your waist.
Plant your roots when the moon is dark. Remember
your past, and ours. Always remember who you are.
Don’t let those men fool you about the ways of life
even if blood must sign your name.
Elfriede Jelinek
Tonight, 2000
Translated by Michael Hoffmann
tonight
my sparrows
let go
the snow
into fields of carnations swollen with anger.
tonight
the three popes
proclaim
the revolution
against teenage television.
seals smash
their heads
bloody
their heads
on the elevators
the paternoster elevators
which delays the holding of their conference.
tonight
my sister
the wind’s bride
gives blood
for the cello
of the jericho desert
which prompts the trombones
to hold a protest meeting.
tonight
I hang your lips
like birdseed
outside my door
and observe
through the window
their death-struggle
with the she vulture.
tonight
let go
the snow
Amy Lowell
Madonna of the Evening Flowers
1919
All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.
Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur.
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet `Te Deums’ of the Canterbury bells.
Joan Larkin
Want
1997
She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe; I want
a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley
reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s
reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice. She wants goats,
chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.
She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.
I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s
tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.
I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.
She’s in her city, meeting
her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.
We’ve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.
Alix Olson
That the Protagonist Is Always a Man
That Cheney’s daughter campaigns for Bush’s son.
That Bush’s son wins a presidency that hates her.
The way Condoleeza Rice called her boss, her husband. That it was an easy slip.
That the 1960s beatniks are the revolutionary poets. That seventh-century-BC Sappho is that lesbian poet.
How the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes Joan Baez as “the female Bob Dylan.” That she launched his career.
That in “female musician,” adjective becomes noun.
How Marge Piercy says “the moon must be female.”
That the moon was forcibly penetrated by an American flag.
That plots on the moon are now up for sale.
Because Mother Earth is melting.
How the Security Council of the United Nations has five permanent members. That all five are the official “nuclear weapon states.” That the United States is the only country to have dropped an atomic bomb. That it is called the security council.
The way the old philosophers who declared human nature to be naturally brutish were men.
How that one guy in your women’s studies class raised his hand for the first time in the semester to reprimand that “men can be raped too.” That we respect all voices. That maybe he has a point. That he is a good guy for being there.
That Margaret Thatcher. Queen Elizabeth. Hillary Clinton.
How anomalies save their ass.
That father with the baby in the backpack in the grocery store.
How exceptions erase us.
That Adam produced Eve. That Mary did not birth Jesus.
How miracles screw us.
The way that a Father, a Son and a Holy Spirit exclude us from the highest positions of power in the Catholic Church. How they, condemning women and fags, then don dresses, diddle little boys, devour the flesh and blood of their gaunt, devout, dapper, special man-friend.
The way women, denied education, had to pass down our herstory through stories and poems and dance and music and recipes. How the Great writers and poets and dancers and musicians and chefs have not been women.
That my computer spell-checks “herstory.”
The way the English language carries us inside Man like his fetus. That is is only our wombs that are patrolled.
That the members of Jane, helping to provide safe abortions before Roe v. Wade, were criminals.
That the rounding bellies in South Dakota clinic lines are murderers.
That Emma Goldman was considered a U.S. terrorist.
That they are pro-life. That they take the good words.
That Ann Coulter may consider herself an “us.”
That self-determination is terrifying.
That self-determination is what we fight for.
That we fight for our sisters’ right to choose stilettos. How the women in horror films can’t run in stilettos. That one drag queen who used her stiletto as a weapon during Stonewall. How the women in horror films can’t run in stilettos.
The way CNN finally devoted an hour long segment to the brutal systematic government-sponsored rapes in Darfur.
How these women fled bombed and burning homes and still had the courage to testify to Amnesty International. How one sixteen-year-old had been raped by ten men for seventy-two hours straight. How pregnant women are not spared. How women have their nails pulled out. How unmarried women are considered spoiled.
That the title of the broadcast was “Angelina Jolie: Her Motherhood, Her Mission.”
That she was wearing stilettos.
That the Lesbian Herstory Archives can fit no more material into its Brooklyn brownstone.
That Focus on the Family headquarters has its own zip code.
That the National Organization for Women. That the Kitchen Table Press. That the Radical Cheerleaders. That the Feminist Majority. That NGLTF. That the Third Wave Foundation. That Planned Parenthood. That the Guerrilla Girls. That Code Pink. That NARAL. That Refuse and Resist.
Is why I am a radical feminist.
Minnie Bruce Pratt
All the Women Caught in Flaring Light
2003
1
Imagine a big room of women doing anything,
playing cards, having a meeting, the rattle
of paper or coffee cups or chairs pushed back,
the loud and quiet murmur of their voices,
women leaning their heads together. If we
leaned in at the door and I said, Those women
are mothers, you wouldn’t be surprised, except
at me for pointing out the obvious fact.
Women are mothers, aren’t they? So obvious.
Say we walked around to 8th or 11th Street
to drop in on a roomful of women, smiling, intense,
playing pool, the green baize like moss. One
lights another’s cigarette, oblique glance.
Others dance by twos under twirling silver moons
that rain light down in glittering drops.
If I said in your ear, through metallic guitars,
These women are mothers, you wouldn’t believe me,
would you? Not really, not even if you had come
to be one of the women in that room. You’d say:
Well, maybe, one or two, a few. It’s what we say.
Here, we hardly call our children’s names out loud.
We’ve lost them once, or fear we may. We’re careful
what we say. In the clanging silence, pain falls
on our hearts, year in and out, like water cutting
a groove in stone, seeking a channel, a way out,
pain running like water through the glittering room.
2
I often think of a poem as a door that opens
into a room where I want to go. But to go in
here is to enter where my own suffering exists
as an almost unheard low note in the music,
amplified, almost unbearable, by the presence
of us all, reverberant pain, circular, endless,
which we speak of hardly at all, unless a woman
in the dim privacy tells me a story of her child
lost, now or twenty years ago, her words sliding
like a snapshot out of her billfold, faded outline
glanced at and away from, the story elliptic, oblique
to avoid the dangers of grief. The flashes of story
brilliant and grim as strobe lights in the dark,
the dance shown as grimace, head thrown back in pain.
Edie’s hands, tendons tense as wire, spread, beseeched,
how she’d raised them, seven years, and now not even a visit,
Martha said she’d never see the baby again.
Her skinny brown arms folded against her flat breasts,
flat-assed in blue jeans, a dyke looking hard as a hammer:
And who would call her a mother?
Or tall pale Connie,
rainbow skirts twirling, her sailing-away plans, islands,
women plaiting straw with shells: Who would have known
until the night, head down on my shoulder, she cried out
for her children shoved behind the father, shadows
who heard him curse her from the door, hell’s fire
as she waited for them in the shriveled yard?
All the women caught in flaring light, glimpsed
in mystery: The red-lipped, red-fingertipped woman
who dances by, sparkling like fire, is she here on the sly,
four girls and a husband she’ll never leave from fear?
The butch in black denim, elegant as ashes, her son
perhaps sent back, a winter of no heat, a woman’s salary.
The quiet woman drinking gin, thinking of being sixteen,
the baby wrinkled as wet clothes, seen once, never again.
Loud music, hard to talk, and we’re careful what we say.
A few words, some gesture of our hands, some bit of story
cryptic as the mark gleaming on our hands, the ink
tattoo, the sign that admits us to this room, iridescent
in certain kinds of light, then vanishing, invisible.
3
If suffering were no more than a song’s refrain
played through four times with its sad lyric,
only half-heard in the noisy room, then done with,
I could write the poem I imagined: All the women
here see their lost children come into the dim room,
the lights brighten, we are in the happy ending,
no more hiding, we are ourselves and they are here
with us, a reconciliation, a commotion of voices.
I’ve seen it happen. I have stories from Carla,
Wanda. I have my own: the hammering at authority,
the years of driving round and round for a glimpse,
for anything, and finally the child, big, awkward,
comes with you, to walk somewhere arm in arm.
But things have been done to us that can never be
undone. The woman in the corner smiling at friends,
the one with black hair glinting white, remembers
the brown baby girl’s weight relaxed into her lap.
The brown-eyed baby who flirted before she talked,
taken and sent away twenty years ago, no recourse.
If she stood in the door, the woman would not know her,
and the child would have no memory of the woman,
not of lying on her knees nor at her breast, leaving
a hidden mark, pain grooved and etched on the heart.
The woman’s told her friends about the baby. They
keep forgetting. Her story drifts away like smoke,
like vague words in a song, a paper scrap in the water.
When they talk about mothers, they never think of her.
No easy ending to this pain. At midnight we go home
to silent houses, or perhaps to clamorous rooms full
of those who are now our family. Perhaps we sit alone,
heavy with the past, and there are tears running bitter
and steady as rain in the night. Mostly we just go on.
Susan Hampton
[I pinch myself hard on the inner arm]
2005
I pinch myself hard on the inner arm,
inwardly smiling yet frightened too – what if
I get caught in this far realm, on the underside of the world,
in these pixelated centuries where humans are exactly
the same, both kind and radically unkind –
So anyway, I say, her husband has his ships ready
to go to war, and he’s waiting for the wind.
He decides to order the sacrifice of their daughter – the wind
comes, and they sail off to defend a trading route at Troy.
Jade says, And this trading route is called “Helen”?
Very good. OK, skip ten years.
When the husband comes back, his wife unrolls a purple carpet
and his cousin prepares a banquet. His wife says, Darling,
the slave-girls have run you a bath. He bathes.
His wife finds out there’s someone at the front door
from Troy, a woman called Cassandra, holding twins
she bore to the husband. Cassandra would like to come in.
Maybe this piece of information was the trigger to the murder –
at any rate, as her husband steps from the tub, she wraps a net
around him as if it were a bathrobe, a net she’d made herself –
Wait, are you hungry? Jade says. Come into the kitchen.
Amid the chicken bones and a potato salad
she says, All right, go on.
You have a very nice mouth, I say.
Go on, she says, the net, wraps it round him.
OK. So the cousin comes in and takes two swipes
with his sword, his two-edged sword,
then the wife beheads the husband with her double-headed axe
AHA! Jade says. Yes, I say.
Then, splashed with his blood and bearing his head,
she runs to the banqueting room where his followers
are being slaughtered among the mixing-bowls.
She has defended herself and her daughter –
everything else is gloss at that point. Revenge,
though sticky-fingered, is sweet.
More chicken?
Thanks. Her kids, a son and daughter, were sent away
in case they grew up wanting to avenge their father.
Which of course they do, Jade says.
The surviving girl sends messages to her brother, who’s
in another country: don’t forget: come home
when you can, and avenge our father –
Years pass. Grown up now, the boy goes to Apollo’s shrine
for advice, and the oracle tells him to do just that.
In the end, the boy does come back from exile, and kills
his mother. A court case develops about the matricide,
and this is where we come into it. See, up till now,
the punishment for matricide has always been death.
Lineage has been through the mother.
But this play was written at a particular point in history.
Or pre-history, Jade says.
Right. So the court is held at the Shrine of Apollo,
and Apollo himself is counsel for the defence.
Alecto is given the job of public prosecutor –
Your sister? Jade says.
Yes. So the Magistrate calls up some citizens, and
we hear the case. What were the mitigating factors?
‘The son was told to do it.’ His father’s ghost
and ‘the oracle of Apollo himself’ told him to kill his mother.
They made the rest of their case,
mostly spurious, one of Apollo’s arguments being
that it’s less bad to kill a woman than a man.
We made some good arguments, but
the vote for the boy to die was fifty-fifty.
At the deadlock, Athena turned up, Athena!
her garment having been kissed by many men or what,
we don’t know, and she in her deciding vote acquitted
him. For us to lose, in effect, a case of matricide
meant the balance of power was shifting.
I pour another vodka. What I didn’t say to Jade was,
it meant we’d be lying low for some time,
centuries perhaps. I remember the fires of earlier camps.
In the distance, border furies, heat furies, storm furies.
The sound of the Barking Owl.
And this owl, a real owl, sounds like a woman being murdered –
Athena, your bird is telling you something!
But Athena, last we heard, was with her cousin Kate Kyriakou
on their way back to Greece for the Olympics.
At the last minute they got a Virgin flight.
It’s an irony of fate, I said, that it was a foremost goddess
who helped tilt that power.
Or not, Jade said, maybe it was simply a pivot-point in storytelling
where men must be shown to be in control, and the best
way to do that is to get a woman to do the job.
Yes, I said. Let’s present it to Athena this way: she’s being chosen
to give an award in a public ceremony and get her picture
in the morning paper, her big chance, as a goddess,
to be kind and compassionate.
To downplay the warlike.
Mesmerise her with theology – Jade said,
and perhaps flirt with her at the same time.
For whatever reason, I said, Athena – without consenting
to matricide – did not give it a high level of punishment.
Certainly she didn’t exact a death.
In that sense you have to admit she is a civilising factor, I said.
Flick your dreads as you may, Jade said.
We hounded the son, though, I said. One time we said
we’d leave him alone for a while if he promised to do
penance at the Temple of Artemis.
Kirya Yvonne
(her comment: Wrote with the brilliant young people in the Queeriosity workshop tonight. I’m sharing for the sake of 30/30, but TRUST that these kids are way more talented than me. This is also totally un-edited.)
2011
Dear Halle Berry, here are some things you need to know:
First of all, fuck you.
For your small frame, and light eyes, and pressed hair.
For your cheerleader beauty queen past.
For you nose job.
For being so quick to show your tits in a movie.
For being the only chick on TV with a white mama
For calling yourself Black
when I needed you to be mixed.
For calling yourself Black and taking all the Black woman roles
from all the darker skinned sisters.
For never
having your blackness questioned despite
your light skin and light eyes and white mama
when I am daily held up and examined.
Fuck you for being the best thing I could look up to.
I see you in my reflection
and it frightens me:
Pretty,
good hair,
getting slimmer everyday,
learning to work my curves,
my feminine wiles,
balancing on that fine line
between reward and manipulation.
I ask myself, how far will I take this?
Would I shave, cut, pluck, dye, straighten,
act straight just to make it?
would it be worth it?
Sometimes I forget
to watch my back.
My bedroom, dressing room,
front door, curtain blacks,
Black, the only costume I can never take off.
I forget how bright the light shines,
that the audience is always paying attention,
paying customers,
they want a good show.
Sometimes I forget that I am anything
more than this body I was born in,
that this body is 500 years of slavery,
forced integration, alcoholic, bad decision,
out-of-wedlock baby.
I forget that my skin holds memory,
holds reflection,
mirror for everyone
loathe to see their own image staring back at them.
I will hold out my hand to you
Sister, who is no more tank and barricade
against this fire then I am.
What strength would I ask you to have
that I cannot wield myself?
Here on the big screen
where all your flaws are amplified
screaming to be accepted.
I will hold out my hand to you
across this mirror and forgive
each and every transgression.
t’ai freedom ford
fourth: a blues
she taste like the color blue…all beautifully bruised and melancholy on my tongue. like blue glinting golden…bee-stung and swollen in a field of cotton…like blue verging black until all memory’s forgotten…she taste like blues…like muddy waters…like daughters of the dust…like mississippi goddamn…like thrust and thirst…like heartbreak so new it tastes like trust at first…like a wound you must nurse with your own salty tears…she taste like blue…cause that’s the color of her: fears/fierce…like an azure hue reminiscent of sky breaking wide open…blue like colored girls who done tried dope when hope wasn’t enough…when that man wasn’t enough…when being tough wasn’t enough…blue like nina’s voice and storm clouds…she rains blue-black…arm, tattooed jack, and sometimes her loyalty is tragic…still she blue like magic…all stardust and confetti and taps of wands…and when the house of cards collapses she responds…with jesus on her breath…eyes watery with devotion…taste like blue: royal and periwinkle and aqua…blue like the fifth chakra vibrating her throat translucent…rocking with holyghost trying to shake loose sin…within her, blues run deep and honeysuckle sweet like grandmama’s hambone on a sunday morn…blue like early morning beckoning sinners toward their reckoning…blue like night sky sucking up light like a magic trick…tragic as guitar strings breaking like my heart…she taste blue like tragedy…all shakespearean and love unfulfilled…but that’s what she do…slips into characters like new skin…ingenue…sparkling blue on silver screens…beautifully blue…making art outta life…all spit-shined and bruised like the blues of the south…a new shade of truth…exploding its name in my mouth…she taste like…
Jackie Kay
Darling
2007
You might forget the exact sound of her voice,
Or how her face looked when sleeping.
You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping
Curled into the shape of a half moon,
When smaller than her self, she seemed already to be leaving
Before she left, when the blossom was on the trees
And the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world.
I held her hand and sang a song from when I was a girl –
Heil Ya Ho Boys, Let her go Boys
And when I stopped singing she had slipped away,
Already a slip of a girl again, skipping off,
Her heart light, her face almost smiling.
And what I didn’t know, or couldn’t see then,
Was that she hadn’t really gone.
The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.
The dead are still here holding our hand
Fay Zwicky
The Age of Aquarius
2006
She slumps in the disabled bay
clutching a waffle-cotton gown
around a spreading paunch,
shambling breasts.
Why not say ‘I’?
For that’s who sits at 6 a.m.
waiting for the health club
pool to open in the rain.
A grown woman, after all,
supposed to know her whereabouts.
Today’s my mother’s birthday,
a 1907 Aquarian of the self-
denying kind, ‘never say “I”’ her motto.
She had me nailed for years. Her voice
drowns out the radio’s chattering static.
Now I’m the same age she was, dying,
observing noble savagery:
a gathering knot of skinny women,
tight black butts in leotards,
regulation sneakers, Brazil-waxed calves,
gripping i-pods, mobiles, water bottles.
The men stand back, silent, sullen,
balding, bored and out of it. Health stalkers,
renouncers of smoke and flame,
deniers of brimstone.
One hell of a century:
between the holocaust and the atom bomb
who are these people?
Between the deep and shallow end,
never say thank you or good morning.
Avoid eye contact.
Signals may be misinterpreted.
Slow Lane, Fast Lane, Walking Lane
Only’s where I’m at.
The moving parts count laps:
twenty five’s a half-hour’s worth.
I sing myself a rumba to keep rhythm;
the Speedo wall clock ticks a strict 4/4
defeats my ruse while dove’s feet skitter
arrow-wise across the perspex roof.
No Diving Running Eating Smiling
Share if lanes are busy.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
The waiting crowd are all, like me,
up early talking or silent,
more vivacious than galahs,
more foolish than parrots.
We stand and wait, walk up and down
in the rain talking or not, holding
in sagging muscle, spreading paunch,
talking about things that must matter.
So much seems to hang on
getting in that door.
Sonya Renee
What Women Deserve
2009
Culturally-diversified biracial girl with
a small diamond nose ring and a pretty smile
poses besides the words
“Women Deserve Better”.
and I almost let her non-threatening grin
begin to infiltrate my psyche
until I read the unlikely small print
at the bottom of the ad:
Sponsored by the US Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
and the Knights of Columbus
On a bus
in a city
with a population of 553,000,
4 teenage mothers on the bus with me,
1 Latina woman with 3 children under 3
and no signs of a daddy.
One sixteen year old black girl
standing in 22-degree weather
with only a sweater
a book bag
and a bassinette,
with an infant that ain’t even four weeks yet
tell me that Yes ….
Women do deserve better.
Women deserve better
than public transportation rhetoric
from the same people who
won’t give that teenage mother
a ride to the next transit.
Won’t let you talk to their kids about safer sex
Have never had to listen as the door SLAMS
behind the man who adamantly says,
“That shit” ain’t his
leaving her to wonder how she’ll raise this kid.
Women deserve better
than the 300 dollars TANF and AFC
will provide that family of three
or the 6 dollar an hour job at KFC
with no benefits for her new baby
or the college degree she may never see
because you can’t have infants at the university
Women deserve better
than lip service paid for by politicians
who have no alternatives to abortion
though I am sure
right this moment one of their seventeen year old daughters
is sitting in a clinic lobby
sobbing quietly and anonymously
praying parents don’t find out
or will be waiting for mom to pick her up because research shows
that out-of-wedlock childbirth doesn’t look good on political polls and
Daddy ain’t having that.
Women deserve better
than backwards governmental policies
that don’t want to pay
for welfare for kids
or health care for kids
or child care for kids
Don’t want to pay living wages to working mothers,
Don’t want to make men who only want to be last night’s lovers
responsible for the semen they lay.
Flat out don’t want to pay for SHIT
but want to control the woman who’s having it.
Acting outraged at abortion.
Well I’m outraged
that they want us to believe
that they believe
that women deserve better.
The Vatican won’t prosecute pedophile priests
But I decide I’m not ready for motherhood
and it’s condemnation for me
These are the same people who won’t support
national condom distribution to prevent teenage pregnancy.
But women deserve better.
Women deserve better
than back-alley surgeries
that leave our wombs barren and empty.
Deserve better
than organizations bearing the name
of land-stealing racist rapists
funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains
with no money to give these women
while balding middle-aged white men
tell us what to do with our bodies
while they wage wars and kill other people’s babies
So maybe women deserve better
than propaganda and lies
to get into office
Propaganda and lies
to get into panties
to get out of court
to get out of paying child support
Get the hell out of our decisions
and give us back our voice
Women do deserve better
Women deserve choice
kari edwards
from the posthumous book Bharat jiva, 2006
[in the general conservative cast . . .]
in the general conservative cast, overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies, in the worried beyond reason shaking dense under-growth invasion of deliberately callous vertebrates, hotheaded newagers paint possible minds dirtier than can be produced in a real whereabouts nonlocation location, crumbling in darkness.
a breath away from my next instant self, knowing lies will flow from my lips as well as the rest; a creative fallacy to create that which we think we know, with a thousand pens ready to suggest what one should do.
reminding myself, all ends with what effects it will have.
reminding myself, all ends with what can be named and financed, so why not let my bones be picked by the ants.
reminding myself, I would do anything to not remember who I resemble, I would do anything to not resemble who I resemble, to not resemble the resembled.
reminding myself, I would do anything to not belong to a future human potential workshop, supported by a cast of thousands begging for all things mundane sanity brings, in general overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies.
Andrea Gibson
I Do
I Do.
I do.
But the motherfuckers say we can’t.
‘cause you’re a girl and I’m a girl
or at least something close
So the most we can hope for is an uncivil union in Vermont
but I want church bells – I want rosary beads;
I want Jesus on his knees.
I want to walk down the aisle while all the patriarchy smiles
That’s not true.
But I do want to spend my life with you.
And I want to know that fifty years from now when you’re in a hospital room
getting ready to die, when visiting hours are for family members only,
I want to know they’ll let me in to say goodbye.
‘Cause I’ve been fifty years memorizing how the lines beneath your eyes form rivers when you cry and I’ve held my hand like an ocean at your cheek saying, “Baby, flow to me.”
‘Cause fifty years I’ve watched you grow with me
fifty years of you never letting go of me,
through nightmares and dreams and everything in between
From the day I said “Buy me a ring.”
Buy me a ring that will turn my finger green so I can imagine our love is a forest
I wanna get lost in you.
And I swear I grew like a flower every hour of the fifty years I was with you
And that’s not to say we didn’t have bad days.
Like the day you said, “That checkout girl was so sweet.”
And I said I’d like to eat that checkout clerk and you said,
“Baby that’s not funny” and I said
“Baby, maybe you could take a fucking joke now and then,”
and so I slept on the couch that night.
But when morning came, you were laughing.
Yeah, there were times we were both half-in and half out the door
but I never needed more than the stars of your grin to lead me home.
For fifty years, you were my favorite poem
and I’d read you every night knowing I might never understand every word
but that’s okay – ‘cause the lines of you were the closest thing to holy I’d ever heard.
You’d say, “This kind of love has to be a verb.
We are paint on a slick canvas – it’s gonna take a whole lot to stick
but if we do, we’ll be a masterpiece.”
And we were.
From the beginning living in towns that frowned at our hand-holding,
folding up their stares like hate notes into our pockets so we could pretend they weren’t there.
You said, “Fear is only a verb if you let it be. Don’t you dare let go of my hand.”
That was my favorite line.
That and the time we saw two boys kissing on the streets in Kansas,
and we both broke down crying, because it was Kansas
and what are the chances of seeing anything but corn in Kansas?
We were born again that day.
I cut your cord and you cut mine,
and the chords of time played like a concerto of hope
Like we could feel the rope unwind,
feel the noose of hate loosening,
loosening from years of “People like you aren’t welcome here.
People like you can’t work here.
People like you cannot adopt”
So we had lots of cats and dogs
and once even a couple of monkeys you taught to sing,
“Hey, hey, we’re the monkeys.” You were crazy like that
And I was crazy about you.
On nights you couldn’t sleep, I’d lay awake for hours counting sheep for you
and you would rewrite the rhythm of my heartbeat with the way you held me in the morning,
resting your head on my chest
and I swear my breath turned silver the day your hair did,
like I swore marigolds grew in the folds of my eyelids the first time I saw you
and they bloomed the first time I watched you dance to the tune of our kitchen kettle in our living room
in a world that could have left us hard as metal,
we were soft as nostalgia together.
For fifty years, we feathered wings too wide to be prey
and we flew through days strong and through days fragile as sand-castles at high tide
and you would fold your love into an origami firefly
and you’d throw it through my passageways until all my hidden chambers were filled with lanterns, now, every trap door, every pore of my heart is open because of you
Because of us
So I do, I do, I do
want to be in that room with you.
When visiting hours are for family members only,
I want to know they’ll let me in.
I want to know they’ll let you hold me
while I sing,
“Ba be de bop de ba ba, baby I’m so in love with you.
Baby, I’m so in love with you.
Ba be de bop ba dingy dong ding – goodbye.”
Merle Woo
Transgenderism:
The Essential Challenge
2003
You might say that our
society has acknowledged. . .finally
three categories of human sexuality:
straight, gay, and bi
But what about transgenderism
which fills out the rest of the sexual spectrum
perhaps unrelated to sexual preference
which is potent in its challenge to
Patriarchal Capitalism?
How will the status quo continue
to reinforce women’s free labor in the home
which justifies their being underpaid at the workplace?
72¢ on the dollar a man makes for white women,
and even less for women of color and disabled women?
How will women’s inferiority be reinforced
The cult of motherhood and servitude
If you can’t tell the difference?
Dominika Bednarska
Cripple
2014
Cripple
I like the rip in it
the space between oh and
ohh not having to cover it like
a rip in my stocking
the gap between what you saw when I was sitting at the bar
and
what you saw when I walked away
I like the ripple in it
the way it mimics the sway
and contract of my body
its constant small motions
the way at first
friends and lovers won’t even say it
can barely push it off the tongue
and then find it one day
not only filled with fire and wind
but also water and air
My Body Has Not Changed
2014
My Body Has Not Changed
I feel smaller with each passing
cut into what I need to stay alive
and that sounds like such a cliché.
I don’t have to guess at what would happen without help
because I remember and this is one piece of it
If I can’t eat because I cant make
food for myself my days will be filled
up with water like my stomach until
I finally can’t take it and have to buy
made food no matter how sick it makes
or how much it costs me
So I will wait until nightfall to eat for the first
time and “Come on.” my friend will say when I call
delirious with hunger or nausea or both and say
“I’m not sure if its worth all the effort it takes
to keep eating….it so much money and energy.”
“You don’t mean that.” She’ll say.
And I don’t.
I mean I get depressed because the very basic resources
I need to stay alive are
constantly being threatened and sometimes
like this time
taken away I want a decent income
satisfying work
a space for my art
and a worthy partner.
This is not asking a lot.
Perhaps you have similar aspirations.
My disability does not prevent me from having any of these things
A system that constantly devalues my life
and criminalizes my need for support services does.
My body has not changed today
What changed was a law
It is not about what I can and can’t do for myself
but what we as a society will
and will not do for one another.
Adrienne Rich
From an Atlas of the Difficult World
1991
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Janani Balasubramanian, ’12, Alok Vaid-Menon, ’13, and Cam Awkward-Rich
Queer Rage
2013
There’s no place like homo
There’s no place like homo
somewhere over the rainbow
way up high
there’s a land that I heard of
once in a lullaby
Wake up honi
it’s called san francisco
where white bourgie bitches getting gay married
but my ass ain’t got an invite sha hoo~
Somewhere over the rainbow
Blue birds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow.
Why then, oh why can’t I?
BECAUSE YOU’RE BROWN HONEY GURL
I’m bout to sassy gay friend this ish ~
Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you
Rainbows are just refracted beams of white light,
Gay marriage activism is a temper tantrum:
Mommy I’m going to buy an “I’m a second class citizen” American Apparel v-neck to go with my corporate internship and some ass
I didn’t always think this way
Cuz philadelphia taught me everything i still know about shame
that my queer body was something to “correct”
that looking like “a faggot with a cunt” only meant
I was looking for trouble
So in high school I laced my shoes with rainbows
and preached the gospel of equal rights and pride
That tell us marriage will finally untangle
our love from shame, will legislate us wholly human
But the day same sex marriage was legalized in New York, DC, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa it didn’t get better because “Somewhere over the rainbow” there’s a pot of Goldman Sachs
**DUN DUN DUN DUN**We are gathered here today**
for richer, for poorer
tell that to El’Jai who lost his job last year
His state is one of only 12
where you cannot legally be fired
for having a body that doesn’t sit right with your heart
but his job “could only be done by a man”
and his genitals did not conform to his employers expectations.
[I do not know if he won the court case, only that he has a son,
and that being brown and trans means being 4 times less likely to find work]
but who needs money for bread when you can eat wedding cake!
in good times and in bad
tell that to Temmie Breslauer a transwoman who was arrested for using
her father’s discount subway card.
the NYPD chained her to a wall for 28 hours and called her a he-she
to have and to be held
this is what marriage means for queer people
as we send the government wedding invitations to incarcerate our love
till death do us part,
tell that to asher brown who at thirteen took a gun to his head
as if it was an act of patriotism because in texas
being gay is a death sentence
it is nights spent whispering secrets to open skies
it is the sound of your mother crying because she wonders
how that thing came out of her
and i do, i do, i do
not believe that a marriage certificate
could have stopped the bullet
Remember,
Remember,
Remember,
There is something beautiful about being lied to:
Rainbows are just a trick of light,
They make us forget the storm is still happening,
When walking towards the end of the rainbow, it will always move away.
Jacks McNamara
The Other Side of the Incantation
the 2000s
It is a summer day
and you are too much alive.
The breeze removes your skin
the chain link fence breathes light
and time stops. It could all come crashing down again
the way daylight savings time starts over
and afternoons get black. There are no guarantees
only facts, miracles, and misunderstandings.
In the beginning it seemed clear
the revolution was too urgent to be beautiful.
Freedom was something that made you grind your teeth
it made you sob it made you broke it made you come
like the explosions at the end of the world
it made you sorry. Freedom was something you could not carry
across the border. It was something you could not keep.
Freedom had scruffy wings and dirty hair and broken shoes
freedom had cold ears and holes in her heart
where the night went. Freedom got swept off the streets
and locked in a padded room. Freedom forgot that she was real.
Sometimes what is real erupts
through the keys in our spine
to make music like earthquakes. Sometimes it plants
a kiss like a promise smudged in the corners of our souls.
Sometimes it leaves a ghost in our bellies
and an ache in our eyes. It does not offer instructions.
We do not understand that we must practice
over and over again. The other side of the incantation
is doing the work. It is not enough
to climb this mountain once.
Rupi Kaur
women of colour (2014)
our backs
tell stories
no books have
the spine to
carry
… (2014)
we all move forward when
we recognize how resilient
and striking the women
around us are
… (2014)
you threw me
onto the ground
in front of you
pushed down
with your foot
and demanded
i stand up
