I always thought
they were small—
my breasts.

But they filled
my baby’s mouth.
& my lover’s tongue
loves them,
& my memory is
filled with all
the pleasure they gave
over the years,

while my mother’s
100-year-old breasts
still hang
waiting.

For what?
For the tongue
of God?
For the spinning Fates
to release them
into the clouds
so she can remember
how to paint
again?

The sky awaits,
& earth itself.

She used to say,
we all
go back to earth
& become
beautiful tomatoes,
peas, carrots.

She was an
ecologist
before the term
was invented.

O Mother
I love you
despite everything.

Peas, carrots,
cauliflower.
Even cabbage.

Erica Jong

when i was too young,
you saved me from the chaos
of see-through water

i sat on the grass
where you watched me kiss the girl
didn’t i look young?

on the red kayak,
i paddle into the bay
endlessly seasick

i taste the inside
of our big swollen city
learning how to walk

looking for my joy
i swallowed a gold penny
found in your shallows

broke a beer bottle
danced on the sweet amber glass
flew past my curfew

i try to find you
ask geese if you are lonely
they wink and say yes.

Leila Mottley

Nắng đi
để lại chiều tà
Người đi
để lại xót xa một đời
Đêm đi
để lại sương rơi
Tình đi
để lại giọt vài khoé mi…

Thương Anh

I was
You were
He, she, it was

Wait a minute

Why shouldn’t you
also be followed by was?

If I were you
I’d say “was”

But I wasn’t you
I never was
nor will I ever be

In class we chuckled
when we recited “He, she-it is”

and the masculine came first
except when going through a door

Then the word she
went through a door

and into a new world

You wasn’t there

You were “he”
and it kept being “it”

but don’t blame “it”

“It” doesn’t even know it’s there

Ron Padgett

The spelling of 40. We have four and fourteen, and then, for no reason I know of, the u is dropped and we’re left with forty, not to mention the schizophrenic forty-four. Most annoying, as Sei Shōnagon would say.

Ron Padgett

for my husband, twenty-one years my senior

There are so many times
I could have killed you.

After twenty-eight years of marriage—
the only contact sport I’ve ever stuck wit—

I found myself

crying this morning,
after a trip outside,
singing Happy Birthday

three times through,

just to be sure,

scrubbing despite
the sting of my split skin

as I’ve loved you through
even the rub
of the raw years.

I held my hands steady
in the water’s reassuring scald,

trying and trying
to save you.

Francesca Bell

I required, finally, a boy with twelve years
of piano lessons singing in his hands,
and the girlfriend before me who taught him
to play scales up and down her body.
He reached casually between my legs,
without needing to look,

to place one practiced finger on my clitoris
and press as if freeing a clear note from his piano.
My body did the rest, bucking against him,
then arching with an involuntary, jubilant moan.
I lay after, amazed and chagrined to think of pleasure,
a spring coiled all that time in my body.

Francesca Bell

Once, I was a whole person.
I agreed to be transformed,
through trauma, into pieces.
I laid myself cheerfully down
before the apocalypse.
After, the doctor placed the baby
among my body’s wreckage.
I learned to call this love.

Francesca Bell

My life sucks, but my wife won’t,
he said, rolling onto his back
on my massage table.

He laughed, a painful choke,
as his penis slowly rose,
quiet question tenting
the flannel sheet.

I think he wanted—
not to be blown,
but played,

trapped song
coaxed from him
by careful embouchure
and another’s breath.

I heard the faint thrum
of his loneliness
all the way home.

Francesca Bell

Every two minutes, an American woman is raped,
her body forced open in the time it takes me to tear
this organic tomato to its pulpy center and bite in,
letting juice run down my chin, stinging.

This tomato a celebration on my tongue reminding me
of the night we spent six hundred dollars on dinner for two,
as that man in Colorado loaded guns into his car.

Food arrived on silk pillows: tiny, purple carrots,
radishes like marbles-fairy vegetables-and a miniature,
individual loaf of bread for each course, and each course
with its own silverware and army of people washing in the back.

As we clinked our glasses together,
he checked his ammunition and gas mask,
and people wondered, popcorn or candy.

This morning, I ran through a forest kept tidy
by rich people like me, Eminem shuffling smoothly
through my iPhone. Somewhere in China,
a young man folded his ruined hands in his lap.

My palms were raised, open.
I imagined texting prayers straight to Heaven: OMG. OMG.
Thank You for this world of green grass and suffering.

Francesca Bell