Woman Like Me
Staying with the man they love even
though
He’s always thinking about someone
else
The girl at the counter, or his
neighbor,
That one with the long waving
auburn hair,
Even Emma, the girl that got away,
That lonely girl that’s always at
her desk.
All women like me-jealous and
spiteful
Raging through their wrath like a
whirlwind fair
Showing such strong intimacy and
yet
They are always feeling
disconnected
Like the die that seemed to be
spinning in
Slow motion between two
numbers-five and
Yes! It landed on six! For a full
house!
But then it was kicked under the
sofa
And went unnoticed until its owners
Wanted to play Yahtzee at their
game night
The leaves change…spring to summer,
and autumn
The trees this spring look the same
as the last
New buds, leaves having different
curvatures,
But still the same. Just as women
like me,
I swear they do…even when their
husbands
And boyfriends watch me walking
down the street.
How my hips sway, encouraging the
rest
Of my dress to follow. Women like me,
They know my own has wandering eyes
too
That he looks for women like them,
like me,
Just a little thinner, or more
robust,
It’s hard to say he has a type when
it’s
Just women, who, like me, wish they
could blind
Him-teach him there is no woman
like me.
_______________________________________
Women Like Me
making promises they can’t keep.
For you, Grandmother, I said I
would pull
each invading burr and thistle from
your skin,
cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt,
take from the ground the dark oily
poison–
all to restore you happy and proud,
the whole of you transformed
and bursting into tomorrow.
But where do I cut first?
Where should I begin to pull?
Should it be the Russian thistle
down the hill where backhoes
have bitten? Or African senecio
or tumbleweed bouncing
above the wind? Or the middle
finger
of my right hand? Or my left eye
or the other one? Or a slice
from the small of my back, a slab
of fat
from my thigh? I am broken
as much as any native ground,
my roots tap a thousand migrations.
My daughters were never born, I am
as much the invader as the native,
as much the last day of life as the
first.
I presumed you to be as bitter as
me,
to tremble and rage against alien
weight.
Who should blossom? Who should
receive pollen?
Who should be rooted, who pruned,
who watered, who picked?
Should I feed the white-faced
cattle
who wait for the death train to
come
or comb the wild seeds from their
tails?
Who should return across the sea
or the Bering Strait or the world
before this one
or the Mother Ground? Who should go
screaming
to some other planet, burn up or
melt
in a distant sun? Who should be
healed
and who hurt? Who should dry
under summer’s white sky, who
should shrivel
at the first sign of drought? Who
should be remembered?
Who should be the sterile chimera
of earth and of another place,
alien with a native face,
native with an alien face?
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