Tuesday Poem: Up From A Long Sleep

Conference 
While an older woman lectures us on Habermas and epideictic writing, based in citizen voice events, notions of complication, and public consequence, 

her ideas hang like twigs in the tightly constructed, multicolored rhetorical nest she is weaving, though we are somewhat distracted by her younger co-presenter, who is trying to hush her feisty three year old, who sings as he draws on the back of her yet-to-be-presented paper, by tearing a page away from the three hundred twenty-eight others 
in the conference program, and folding it into an airplane, which takes off from the table, rising and falling at the end of the little 
boy’s arm, until it comes crashing 
down, like a baby bird at the older woman’s feet, and she slowly stoops to pick it up, never missing a single beat.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published in Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry in 1994

What Saved Her

                                     

When they were napping,

she discovered she could

grow feathers at will, so black,

they shone like a mirror, fanning out

as she stretched her wings,

and a beak hard and sharp

as a pencil point, to peck at the glass

that kept her out of the fields she could see,

                                    

and without so much as a look back

at their golden heads damp with dreams,

she was out and flying to the others,

clustered dark and narrow-shouldered

on limbs, on fences, chilling the air with their fury.

   

She could watch herself: claws

tearing at flesh, caws, loud and raucous,

hers and theirs, a chorus of dry stalks,

carrion erasing everything:

the white bones picked

clean and catching light.

                       

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by Writing Women in 1997

The Year of the Plum-Colored Bathing Suit

her breasts were blue-veined

porcelain and full of milk

for the baby.

She waited for him to notice

them spilling, a soft waterfall,

wished he would ask her

to put marmalade on them at tea-time.

All summer she offered him sweet rolls,

hoped he would cup her lightly

in long china fingers.

Instead he stayed out of the water, reading,

or changing the baby's diapers,

or teasing their oldest boy

unmercifully.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published in Footwork 1987

My Mother Always Seemed Bigger Than Me

her face as round as a Russian Doll’s.

She even wore a babushka when it rained.

And her mother bigger still, enveloping her

in the do’s and don’ts of the world,

all the frowning dimpled faces and stocky bodies,

with wagging stubby fingers: No, no, no.

And my grandmother’s mother before her,

wearing cabbage and bacon grease perfume.

All the way back to Holland they go,

All of them closing over me, each 

generation more massive than the last.

All of them cast from a similar mold,

their arms painted on, akimbo over aprons,

faces barely holding in the rage they feel,

about working, working, always working

for children who don't appreciate.

O lineage of matriarchs, who tucked
your sheets too tight, I see you floating 

above me as my shadow comes down,

round as a bell jar,  grim as the final 
hour of night over my daughters, 

passing on that darkness, 
whether I want to or not.