I am an inconvenient woman.
I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or an adding machine.
I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf coming in
Or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.
I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.
I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.
I love you when you are discussing changes in the class structure
And I’m not supposed to, and it crowds my eyes
And jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers.
I am an inconvenient woman.
You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.
You might trade me in for a yak.
They are faithful and demand only straw.
They make good overcoats.
They never call you up on the telephone.
I love you with my arms and my legs
And my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.
I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.
I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.
I want to read you poems about drowning myself
Laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelley’s wings.
I want you to read my old loverletters.
I want you to want me
As directly and simply and variously
As a cup of hot coffee.
To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.
I carry my love for you
Around with me like my teeth
And I am starving.
and although they have
pronounced us dead, we
rise again invisibily,
we rise and the sun sings
in us sweet and smoky
- from "The Inside Chance" by Marge Piercy
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not to be done. She is pushing on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.
How superior we are now: see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors.
She runs on a treadmill every morning,
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt,
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles,
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food
hungry, always hungry:
a woman made of pain.
A cat or dog approaches another,
they sniff noses. They sniff asses.
They bristle or lick. They fall
in love as often as we do,
as passionately. But they fall
in love or lust with furry flesh,
not hoop skirts or push up bras
rib removal or liposuction.
It is not for male or female dogs
that poodles are clipped
to topiary hedges.
If only we could like each other raw.
If only we could love ourselves
like healthy babies burbling in our arms.
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed
to need what is sold us.
Why should we want to live inside ads?
Why should we want to scourge our softness
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting?
Why should we punish each other with scorn
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?
When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
Marge Piercy read from her work and then joined with Martin Espada in a conversation as part of Lannan Foundation's Reading and Conversation Series live at the Lensic Theater.
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 will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.
Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.
Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.
Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.
Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.
Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.
Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.
Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
