FromIntersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry.
First published in You Are Here: New York City Streets in Poetry(Peggy Garrison, Victoria Hallerman, and David Quintavalle, eds.,P & Q Press, 2006).
The Women
Into the circle of women I entered, not knowing at first
the significance of their power working as a double-pointed needle—
stitches, like deliberate words, slipped into strong threads
in the small talk, gossip, and debate, in the speech unfolding
that flung dice against the white walls until they wore eyes
while winds lashed at the village square with unruly tongues
and men wore the black shadows of women unknowingly,
their deeds interwoven, their give- and-take a bargaining that
surfaced even in the harshest elements so that ultimately the women
wore this necklace of pride, an adornment of rough rope,
frayed where it stretched and rubbed against the corners of walls
they carefully walked around, which became sinews of gold in the sunlight,
where their husbands escorted them, beside their children, along the promenade,
their worth now displayed, portrayed even to the other women who know
them silently, as they push the needle through the last hours of afternoon,
as they hover where the day does not move,
as they guide the thread along patterns so neatly presented.
Unremarkable moment,
slip your hand down my shirt and feel my heart beat so that I can measure your insatiable appetite and pace myself. I hear your metronome tap out its beat as your hand touches my breast, cool, like the hands of statues poised in a museum park on the Peloponnese, where hardly an echo reverberates, the artist’s hands now silenced on the broken relics of an ancient age; breeze, the reminder, drapes the shaded grove of stone men, stoic, phallic. Who would dance with these headless men? If ancient stone could come alive, what would I feel here, where women tended the physical bodies of a nation, washing its wounds, nurturing its young, their hands moving over the skin of politics while the words of men chiseled into time?