Read My Mother's Body for Free Online Page B

blows.
    My mother wielded it more fiercely
    but my father far longer and harder.
    I’d twist my head in the mirror to inspect.
    I’d study those red and blue mountain
    ranges as on a map that offered escape,
    the veins and arteries the roads
    I could travel to freedom when I grew.
    When I was eleven, after a beating
    I took and smashed the ruler to kindling.
    Fingering the splinters I could not believe.
    How could this rod prove weaker than me?
    It was not that I was never again beaten
    but in destroying that stick that had measured my pain
    the next day I was an adolescent, not a child.
    This is not a tale of innocence lost but power
    gained: I would not be Sisyphus.
    There were things that I should learn to break.

Paper birds
    Paper birds:
    can they fly?
    Not far.
    Can they dive after fish?
    Do they lay edible eggs?
    Do they eat harmful insects?
    No, but they sing
    both long and short
    and scratch real fleas.
    Can you cook them?
    How do they taste?
    Like you. Like me.
    They fill the mind
    but half an hour later
    you want more.
    How many kinds are there?
    They evolve, like other
    birds, fill empty niches,
    become extinct.
    But each species
    is composed of only one.
    How do they reproduce then?
    By fission. By fusion.
    By one hell of a lot of work.

Listening to a speech
    The woman carefully dressed
    in quasimale drag
    fashionable among her friends
    spoke scornfully from the podium
    of bourgeois housewives.
    Bourgeois? Someone who works
    for nothing
    who owns zip,
    who receives no pension,
    who possesses no credit, no name.
    I thought the bourgeoisie
    owned the means of production?
    She is a means of reproduction
    leased by her husband,
    liable to be traded in.
    Those widows who live on cat food,
    those ladies who eat in cafeterias
    once a day, taking fifteen
    minutes to choose their only dish,
    their houses have deserted them.
    This bag lady chewing stale hot-
    dog buns from the garbage igloo,
    who pees in the alley squatting,
    who sleeps in an abandoned car,
    was a bourgeois housewife.
    Your superiority licks itself
    like a pleased cat. No housewife
    is bourgeois any more than pets
    are, just one owner away
    from the streets and starvation.

Making a will
    Over the shoulder peer cartoon images
    of skinny misers and bloated bankers
    disinheriting wayward daughters in love
    with honest workingclass boys;
    the dowager in her bed writing in
    the gardener, writing out her nephew.
    Little goes the way we plan it
    even with us to knead and pull,
    stir and sweeten and cook it down.
    How many scenes written flat on the back
    in bed ever play in the moonlight?
    How often revenge bubbles itself flat.
    Given wobbly control with all our
    muscle and guile and wit bearing down
    like a squad of tactical police,
    how do we suppose when we’re ashes
    what we think we want will matter?
    Less than the spider in the rafters.
    We cannot protect those we love
    no matter how we gild and dip them
    in the molten plastic of our care;
    when we are gone our formulae
    in legal sludge guarantee nothing
    but that all lawyer’s fees be paid.
    Maybe it is an act of faith
    not in anything but the goodwill
    of a few, those documents of intent
    we scatter in which we claim sound mind
    and try to stuff a log in the jaws
    of fate to keep those teeth from closing.
    Our will dies with us indeed, although
    consequences resonate through the stars
    with old television dramas,
    undergoing a red shift we will never
    comprehend as distance bends our acts,
    our words, our memories, to alien
    configurations fading into lives
    of creatures strange to us as jellyfish
    in a future we have hewn, bled,
    bounded and escaped from. What
    we have truly bequeathed is what
    we have done or neglected, to that end.

Still life
    We have glass eyes and rubber fingers.
    Our minds are industrial dumps,
    full of chemical residues, reruns,
    jeans commercials and the asses
    of people we have never touched.
    The camera sees for us.
    Our pets act out our emotions.
    Quiet has to