Marge Piercy
The Neighbor
Man stomping over my bed in boots Carrying a large bronze church bell Which you occasionally drop: Gross man with iron heels Who drags coffins to and fro at four in the morning, Who
To the Pay Toilet
You strop my anger, especially When I find you in restaurant or bar And pay for the same liquid, coming and going. In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas Some woman is dragging
The Cat's Song
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says The cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing Milk from his mother’s forgotten
Belly Good
A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs But I’ve never seen wheat in a pile. Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots Make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek As a seal hauled out in
Visiting a Dead Man on a Summer Day
In flat America, in Chicago, Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. Forty feet of Corinthian candle Celebrate Pullman embedded Lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. The Potter Palmers float In an island
The Seven Of Pentacles
Under a sky the color of pea soup She is looking at her work growing away there Actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans As things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If
My Mother's Body
1. The dark socket of the year The pit, the cave where the sun lies down And threatens never to rise, When despair descends softly as the snow Covering all paths and choking roads:
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
The construction of a woman: A woman is not made of flesh Of bone and sinew Belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe. She is manufactured like a sports sedan. She is retooled,
The Friend
We sat across the table. He said, cut off your hands. They are always poking at things. They might touch me. I said yes. Food grew cold on the table. He said, burn your
The Morning Half-Life Blues
Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work In fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur. The shop windows snicker Flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford: You are not pretty
Barbie Doll
This girlchild was born as usual And presented dolls that did pee-pee And miniature GE stoves and irons And wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy. Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate
Colors Passing Through Us
Purple as tulips in May, mauve Into lush velvet, purple As the stain blackberries leave On the lips, on the hands, The purple of ripe grapes Sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I
Always Unsuitable
She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck. They were grinning politely and evenly at me. Unsuitable they smirked. It is true I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts Too big
For the Young Who Want To
Talent is what they say You have after the novel Is published and favorably Reviewed. Beforehand what You have is a tedious Delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done After
The Woman in the Ordinary
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl Is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched. Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself Under ripples of conversation and debate. The woman in the block of
Implications of One Plus One
Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging, Continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten Veins of fire deep in the earth and raising Tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra. Sometimes your hands drift
Winter Promises
Tomatoes rosy as perfect baby’s buttocks, Eggplants glossy as waxed fenders, Purple neon flawless glistening Peppers, pole beans fecund and fast Growing as Jack’s Viagra-sped stalk, Big as truck tire zinnias that mildew Will
A Work Of Artifice
The bonsai tree In the attractive pot Could have grown eighty feet tall On the side of a mountain Till split by lightning. But a gardener Carefully pruned it. It is nine inches high.
Attack of the Squash People
And thus the people every year In the valley of humid July Did sacrifice themselves To the long green phallic god And eat and eat and eat. They’re coming, they’re on us, The long
You Ask Why Sometimes I Say Stop
You ask why sometimes I say stop Why sometimes I cry no While I shake with pleasure. What do I fear, you ask, Why don’t I always want to come And come again to
Traveling Dream
I am packing to go to the airport But somehow I am never packed. I keep remembering more things I keep forgetting. Secretly the clock is bolting Forward ten minutes at a click Instead
Toad Dreams
That afternoon the dream of the toads Rang through the elms by Little River And affected the thoughts of men, Though they were not conscious that They heard it. Henry Thoreau The dream of
To Be of Use
The people I love the best Jump into work head first Without dallying in the shallows And swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element,