Feminist Poets

May 23, 2016

“Malignant” by Robin SilbergleidPosted by

Robin Silbergleid

MALIGNANT

In the third hour in the family surgical waiting area
my brother asks if I’m going to write a book about our
mother’s cancer, and I shrug because there’s not much

to say about the lump or the MRI with the blue dye
snaking toward her lymph nodes or the medical grade
saran wrap and sports bra the surgeon called a “binder,”

which, when she’s home later, we’ll chip away at, and I
won’t point out the irony of her saying it’s “killing” her
to wear it, because all that is still far away from the room

where we sit with our books and technologies, with
other waiting families and boxes of Kleenex, and I know
he’s just making small talk, which is better than our sister

mumbling to herself or anyone who will listen, right now
prattling on about the miracle of split screens on her laptop,
but the truth is I’m not sure what it means to call us family

beyond this shared concern and a smidge of DNA, each of us
like planets orbiting the same sun but never making
real contact, which is reserved instead for the ones we choose

to love—like his wife, whose wedding dress cost more than
my bathroom, at home with her feet propped up, days from
giving birth and waiting for the cupcake he bought her

at the café down the hall—but I can’t tell him any of this,
especially not today, because it’s clear as malignant
cells under a microscope we don’t know each other at all.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
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Robin Silbergleid: “I’ve identified as a feminist since I was about eighteen and read Chris Weedon’s Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory as an undergrad. My poetry often addresses subjects of gender, alternative families, the female body, and reproduction. I’ve had the occasion recently to read my work to and host workshops for other women who have struggled with infertility and pregnancy loss, which, at its best, feels like a powerful, woman-centered and feminist connection. Although these poems aren’t the best illustration of this principle, I see much of my work as an instance of feminist activism.” (website)

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May 20, 2016

“Fun with Xerox” by Amber ShockleyPosted by

Amber Shockley

FUN WITH XEROX

It all started when Johnny lifted 
her, laughing, onto the glass, 
and as the green beam
scanned her ass he kissed her,
still laughing, their mouths
smashed and shoulders shaking.
He thumbed the print-out from
the tray and adjusted the contrast
on the machine, making gleeful
beeps with his forefinger then
telling her, Hop up there again.
She What if my ass gets cancer?
even as she turned backward,
raised her skirt, which bunched
and tightened over her thighs.
He What if your pussy gets herpes
from you-know-who? and they both
knew-who, and she’d flushed at that,
because she was dating Todd
who she didn’t like because Johnny 
was dating Angela from another 
department at the time
and she’d flushed again, 
her ass warm, her cunt hovering 
over the inner workings of the copier, 
thinking of Angela who wears silk 
blouses and would never 
do this with Johnny or anyone else,
who would never have herpes.
She knows how mean grown 
men can be when they turn, in a flash, 
back to boyish. Still, now,
even the whir of the microwave oven
turns her on, the dull thud rumble
of the dryer, the soft click of the toaster—
any otherwise cold, inanimate thing
made intimate by electric current.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
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Amber Shockley: “I remember the first time someone called me a ‘feminazi.’ I was in high school. He was my art teacher. I was stunned because the implication was so far from everything I believed, and still believe, which is that women should be allowed the social freedom to do any damn thing they want to do—from baking cookies to building engines. I don’t care if a woman wants to wear an apron or a pantsuit or a baby (I recently found out, with enough fabric, this is possible). I just don’t care. My hope is that my poetry doesn’t put any constraints on women, but that it shows them in their diversity.”

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May 18, 2016

“When Miguelito Should Have Been Sleeping” by Yaccaira SalvatierraPosted by

Yaccaira Salvatierra

WHEN MIGUELITO SHOULD HAVE BEEN SLEEPING

and his tías de México and his mother gathered around
the kitchen table, stories drifting toward his room
like cafecito vapor, he leaned against his door to listen.
When he first heard about how his orphaned grandmother

was her own godmother’s criada, how she would fall asleep
while scrubbing los pinche pisos—knees and knuckles
tired and raw from scratching against the cracked
clay floor—he imagined himself standing

next to his grandmother’s child-body: limp limbs, ragged-
heavy like a drenched mop’s clothed tentacles;
he imagined himself ordering the opening of the earth,
¡Ábrete! ¡Ábrete, trágatela ahora cuando está dormida!

When he heard how his grandfather would shove a kicking
and screaming laughter into a plastic bag on those days
he left to work on foreign lands, but leave his daughters
without half a giggle because Miguelito’s grandfather

would need laughter more, he imagined himself
waiting for his grandfather’s hurried stride. He imagined
flinging himself toward the thick plastic, tearing it open
with a fork to let laughter bounce back into the bellies

of children because what are children without laughter?
When he learned how Fausto, the catechist, would lure children
into praying un “Padre nuestro” while their fathers were leaving
one by one, he wondered why his tías would say, Dios lo bendiga.

But when he first heard about his mother clubbing
the neighbor’s stray pig to death when she was a child,
he wept, but not for the pig.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

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Yaccaira Salvatierra: “Because of my mother, I learned to be unapologetic as a Latina in the United States as in my parents’ countries. Por ti, madre, aprendí que las mujeres—aunque el cuerpo, la sociedad o la religión lo impida—podemos hacer lo que nos propongamos. Cuando llegaste a los Estados Unidos, no entendías ni hablabas inglés pero por necesidad trabajabas limpiando casas, cocinabas para otras familias y cuidabas niños ajenos. En tu casa siempre fuiste otra. Te propusiste aprender inglés y, años después, por deseos tuyos, fuiste trabajadora de servicio de limpieza urbana: una basurera entre puros hombres. I write poetry. I write about the string of stories attached to her and my family. Unapologetic.”

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May 16, 2016

“Machetes: Several” by Lucinda RoyPosted by

Lucinda Roy

MACHETES: SEVERAL

Men: several. Night: one.
The year was 1979. At 23 I was as wily as
cow dung. Took me several minutes to realize
I’d been invaded. Half-asleep, I saw male forms
moving around my room—men with a purpose.
I took umbrage—chased them with a broom,
slashing at the one who fled through the window,
his ashy leg the last thing I saw before he disappeared
into the bush. (When his calloused foot got caught
on the window ledge I batted at it with my witch’s broom.
God, I was an idiot.) But half a dozen armed robbers
had been in my room. Having flown all the way
to Freetown on a British Caledonian jet
I took umbrage. The picked-for-prettiness-and-language-skills
“air hostesses” had worn Scottish tartan tailored into fetching,
figure-hugging outfits that yelled demure but whispered
bosoms. In those days they came running
when you pressed the button overhead,
even when you were sitting in coach.
Apart from the nuns there was no one
to whom I could report the armed robbery.
They tut-tutted and told me to hire a night
watchman—though you couldn’t trust Africans,
they added, so be careful. I’d stopped reminding them
my father was black—water off a duck’s
back. Around the nuns’ whitewashed convent
was a stark white wall as welcoming as a chastity belt.
You needed rappelling equipment or a bishop’s ring
to scale it, which was why the nuns were left
alone. That and Father Stefano, who had a rifle
(and Jesus, of course, who didn’t).
Machetes: several. Me: one.
On the corrugated tin roof that night—deluge.
In the decades since, rain and robbery
are as intertwined in my head as women
and service used to be.
They stole the silver ring my mother
gave me. Worth almost nothing,
it was the thing I missed the most. They tried
to take my savings book, too, which was why I chased
them and made them drop it. Banks in Sierra Leone
wanted proof of deposit, and my savings book
was all the proof I had that I’d been squirreling away
every penny so I could fly home after a year to see
my mother. My little red savings book was as precious
to me as Mao’s book would be to a communist.
I missed my mother, my best friend,
the way a nun would miss the Eucharist.
I was pitch-black lonely.
I’d been allowed to bring one suitcase
to last me two years. I’d stuffed it with “T’s”:
t-shirts, toiletries, terror and tampons.
I brought my boom box and Stevie Wonder
to make the bush feel more like the South
of London, where I used to sit in my hungry bedroom
like a fool and dream of going to save something
very grateful, something very large.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
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Lucinda Roy: “I am a feminist of color committed to exploring issues experienced by women and girls I’ve known, and the girl and woman I myself have been/am, even now, becoming. I believe that the essence of poetry is its ability to communicate across difference—something we seem to need now as much as ever. ‘Machetes: Several’ portrays an armed robbery I experienced while teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Although it was long ago, it’s an episode that still haunts me, still obliges me to reconsider violation by looking at it through a complex, multifaceted lens, especially in light of what happened to that impoverished country subsequently.” (website)

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May 13, 2016

“Flashdance” by Laura ReadPosted by

Laura Read

FLASHDANCE

The year I was 13, I worked in a steel mill by day
and as an exotic dancer at night like all my friends

in 8th grade. We were tired but about to get
our big break. Since we were all Jennifer Beals,

we wore leg warmers to keep our calves loose
so we’d be always ready to show what we had.

We cut the necks out of our sweatshirts so they slid
off our shoulders even though our mothers

made us wear shirts underneath. I didn’t tell
the other Jennifers how I went down to my room

in the basement where I moved after my mother
remarried and started to have new children

and played “Maniac” and tried to run in place
as fast as the real Jennifer, so fast you couldn’t see

the magic. Like those flipbooks of cartoons,
each drawing only different by one small move.

And then the song when she shows everyone
what’s under her welder’s mask and overalls,

a body that can fly across a wood floor and land
in a somersault. I had to pretend the flying part—

there wasn’t enough room between my bed
and the accordion door my new father installed.

I lived in a warehouse like Jennifer.
I couldn’t believe it when she went to dinner

at the seafood restaurant with that man and slid
her foot into his lap. I thought it must have felt

like the lobster she was eating,
something I’d never had.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

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Laura Read: “I consider myself a feminist poet because many of my poems are about the experience of growing up as a girl and then being a woman in our society. I have been greatly influenced by my mother who was a women’s studies professor for 41 years. I remember all the books on our coffee table had ‘women’ in the title. Now I teach a women writers class at the community college where I work.”

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May 11, 2016

“from The Baby Hygiene Series” by Jessy RandallPosted by

Jessy Randall

from THE BABY HYGIENE SERIES

eRandall1

 

 

eRandall2
 

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

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Jessy Randall: “The first poem I ever published was about pantyhose. It appeared in a feminist literary journal called The Unforgettable Fire in 1992. I don’t know if feminist poetry makes much difference in the world, but I can’t write any other kind.” Note: Illustrations are from The English Duden: A Pictorial Dictionary with English and German Indexes. London: George G. Harrap, 1960. (website)

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May 9, 2016

“Dissonance” by Jenny QiPosted by

Jenny Qi

DISSONANCE

The woman is the one who loses
when a relationship ends, warns my father,
my father who had never been with a woman
before he married my mother at twenty-eight
and later made an online dating profile
using a photo taken the day of her funeral
because it was his only recent photo in a suit,
my father who had never been alone
in fifty-four years.

I wonder when he says this if he is thinking
of the man my mother loved before him,
if she told him how it hurt the first time
she knew love could deceive, how
experience blunted her next disappointment.
Or is he thinking of their second decade,
his palm slamming hollowly on the plastic
kitchen table, her threats of divorce empty
except of venom. I wonder if he noticed
the ragged edge in the yellow pages,
long list of attorneys missing. If he knew
about the envelope beneath the mattress,
a thousand dollars in tips folded neatly
over a creamy white business card.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

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Jenny Qi: “Trying to explain why I identify as a feminist poet is like trying to explain why I identify as human. Perhaps the most honest explanation is that my mother was the kind of woman who knocked on every door of a university until she got her first job after immigrating to the U.S., and she was the kind of woman who said, ‘If I had raised that friend of yours, he would have grown a spine.’ She was also the kind of woman who worked two shifts and, instead of collapsing into a bed, stood outside my third grade classroom to make sure I’d gotten to school. My mother was my first best friend, and she died when I was nineteen. Everything I’ve written since then has a bit of her in it.” (website)

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