Tuesday Poem: previously published in Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality, ed. Marilyn Sewell 1987

Image from Apron Stringz blog by Calamity Jane

domestic poem

Nightfall I sink

into dishwash meditation :

steaming china prayer wheels

crystalline bells of a lost horizon

breathing slows

din and lull of running water from crockery mandalas

moist heat muscles soften

zen poems drip from silverware

air hums out a chanting

cleansing melody

washing the frantic stew of a day

down the drain along with the suds

those transient rainbow things

thin skin of the passing instant.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 2003

painting by Phil Wood

 Hunger Report # 117

It was when he stopped the car

and shouted that I could get out

and walk the rest of the way home,

there on Mohawk Street, which was miles away,

that I started craving cream cheese.

Cream cheese with bacon and tomato

to be exact He bought it a couple of days ago

to eat with the dozen bagels.

Cream cheese, smoke, and salt on Triscuits.

That’s how I wanted to eat it,

crunching them like bones between my teeth.

His, mine, the bones of our contention,

each slathered with  his love

to help me choke them down.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

 Sculpture by Paul Villinski

Death Called To My Mother

butterfly silent.

Butterflies she loved

and talked about:

their delicacy and color,

their brevity through golden air;

as if the blossoms themselves

had taken flight,

their pollen-rich leaps

from flower to flower,

their nectar-driven reveries.

It was death,

hovering in the garden,

she opened her heart to,

weary as she was of struggling,

and loss after loss, never getting

past the caterpillar's hunger,

over-filling her plate

as if searching for

herself in all that weight.

She didn't know

the word for soul, in Greek,

is the word for butterfly too.

She only knew,

in dreams, they covered her,

like a quilt of shivering wings:

Adonis Blue, Pearly Eye,

Swallowtail, Roadside Skipper.

Come, they whispered.

the chrysalis is waiting.

It’s finally time

for bliss.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by The Nerve: Writing Women of 1997 from Virago Press

 
Romare Bearden's "In The Garden"

Sunny in the Cotton Field

looking distant as she bends

to rest the heavy sack on the ground.

Why’s Sunny so dreamy today ?

Her look so far away: probably

back at the house where her baby

cries and nobody’s picking him up.

Sunny’s arms ache, her breasts gone dry

so baby can feed while she’s away.

What is Mama thinking?

Sitting out on the porch, dozing off

when she should be inside.

Sunny Dark Chocolate

Sweet, uh-huh. That’s what she says to herself

when a little white girl on the bus

points her finger, pale as a maggot, at Sunny,

says Look, Mama. Look. 
A lady made of chocolate!

Then the bus goes all 
shamed and silent,

for a heartbeat or two, 

but it’s enough to give

Sunny an ache in her neck, 

from holding her head up

as she lowers herself 

out the back door.

Sunny Tough Hands

from pulling that soft white stuff

out of claws that hold it tight.

Nothing white without a price.

Jim Crow’s told her that, in how many ways?

As soon as she had ears to hear and eyes to see.

Sunny Too Fat

made her brothers laugh,

say her butt quivers

like the skin that holds the river in.

Right, she said.

And if you don’t stop pinching

and brushing past me

I’ll throw myself in there,

and wash away for good!

Ssss, Sunny, come on, 
sit down with me

Mama putting the plates out, 

just two of them,

for biscuits and honey 

and chamomile tea.

Mama always so good at fixing things:

the miserable din of her brothers,

the dogs, the fields receding

in a hum of pleasure,

the two of them drunk like bees.

Sunny Like A Tree

breaks the blue horizon

stuck in the red dirt of this place,

and reaching up to heaven

with pleading limbs.

Well, not really.

She wouldn’t get very far doing that,

what with the bag dragging behind her,

that won’t go filling itself.

But once in a while she looks up

and that big old leafless thing

seems to be on fire as sun sinks into night.

She imagines it calling through God’s thin ether,

telling Him : Look here, Lord.

Is this all you made us for?

When will you put things right?