Tuesday Poem: Previously published by lingerings in 1999

Cheap

You find your grandmother

sitting on the dusty antique shop shelf,

in a golden glazed rough-edged mixing bowl,

the kind they used to sell in the hardware
stores for cheap, so no one, back then,
paid them any mind, functional as they were,
in a kitchen like hers, where you made
what you could from scratch.

You are moved to pick the bowl up,
your fingers reading the low relief
on its sides, a house and garden:
as far from the tenement she lived in,
as you are now, from the calloused 

grip of her hand on your little arm.

You think maybe you’ll rescue it

from this place's clutter and chaos,

but then you look at the price,

and picture her tsking

and shaking her head.

Too dear, she would have said,

and you agree, putting it 

back on the shelf,

taking what’s free instead.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Icarus Rising in 2001

painting by Sally Noble

Crow Woman

sits up black as humid earth,

rises out of a wallow of water

and humus, black and stake-burnt

for harboring knowledge,

for power enough say no,

witch woman, cinder saint,

shakes a tail feather loose

and delivers a baby,

footprints filling with ooze

in her wake, as she struts her

reek of passion, muck of sexuality,

stubborn blood that will not come out,

crow woman, shaven headed

intimate of trees and tinctures,

tarred and feathered adultress,

sticky baby you can’t let go of,

nodding earthward, flying, flying,

landing you in the brambles,

earth angel, flying the highways

commuting, commuting

the sentence, the sentence of night,

and you, and you with your sharp

crow eating night kill eyes,

dare you to follow,

dare you to try

to get rid of her.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 1999, and in The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

 

The Circus Comes To Paterson

Once they set up Clyde Beatty’s Big Top

at the foot of Sandy Hill, in the empty lot

where projects used to rise in long barracks rows,

housing the soldiers and their wives after the war,

and then struggling families like mine,

until they finally knocked them down,

flattened them like furrows

ploughed up for just a few seasons

to give us all a chance to sow a future.

And there it was: our future,

in a house, with an alleyway and a garden,

on Summer Street, ripeness setting in, I guess,

because when the circus came

our parents were giddy too,

as we joined the crowd in the bleachers,

sitting in the backs of flat beds,

and pulled in a circle

like a wagon train at chow time.

And we were just like pioneers sitting there,

doing something we’d never done,

a circus right in our living room,

that’s what it felt like

until the elephants came out

and no more than five minutes into the act

one of them broke ranks,

dragging the trainer with her,

the poor guy dangling like an earring

from the hook he held to the side of her head.

That elephant’s berserk!, someone screamed,

and we screamed too when she charged at the trucks,

as people fled up the seats and dropped off the back.

We were paralyzed, which turned out to be all right

because she wasn’t interested in us at all,

she was more intent on the freedom she saw

through an opening in the canvas

and was gone before we had that figured out.

The rest is hearsay.

Stories about her lurking behind the drugstore,

so that Doc nearly had a heart attack,

when he went to see why his dog 
was barking so loud, of how 
she wedged herself between 
the shoemaker’s house and garage,

bending the aluminum siding, 
as she eased back out, how she reared up 
and stamped a footprint in the sidewalk,

before turning tail and running past our house,

so Ralph next door thought he was 
going crazy, when he looked up 
from the paper, and she flew by 
like a bat out of hell.

They caught her way up high on the hill,

locked her in the back of a tractor trailer,

but the circus that day was done for,

there was no going back.

They worked her too hard, 

my mother said to my Dad.

This is what happens .

Meanwhile I stroked the garage’s new curved edges

where her anger had made its mark,

watching the girls take turns

stamping the sidewalk as hard as they could

inside the ring of her footprint.