Featured Poet
( Wellfleet, Massachusetts )
poem and audio link
Get back in the box. It’s a nice box, pink, cozy. Lined with quilted satin. It smells of carnations, lavender. It’s a box with a view: tidy white streets lined with trim white houses housing nice white people. There’s a church on every block with a phallic steeple where God the Father is worshipped and sin exposed. Everything you need to know is contained in a little book about Dick and Jane and Spot. Spot chases a bitch and goes straight to hell. So does she with other wicked females. You’re safe: just so long as you stay in your box.
Since I work on the computer in all drafts, I never keep old drafts. I just keep revising until I think the poem is done. Then I perform it. In front of an audience is when I hear the flaws, the parts I faked or reneged on, the places where it is slack or unclear. Then I revise again. The only poem that exists is the current one, sometimes finished, sometimes not.
This poem should be dedicated to George Bush and all his colleagues who want to take away women’s right to control our own bodies. I spent the last four years researching and writing and researching some more for my new novel SEX WARS the post-Civil war period in which the big issues were abortion, contraception, censorship, obscenity, the rights of women and minorities, immigration, should Christianity be the state religion and should the Bible be taught in public schools and election fraud. The parallels were remarkable. These are hot button issues that don't go away. Trying to undo all the gains that millions of women have worked to achieve is one of the primary goals of this administration, besides its imperial program. We are permitting this to happen.