West Bank Poetry

Her poems all smell of menstrual blood.
She says God is a woman who created man
to work sheet rock and move the couch.
She wears sweatshirts over-sized
and penny-loafers with nothing in the slots.

I love her because she thinks she speaks for me,
wears anger like a nesting pad of rolling fat
out from under her chopped-up hair--
a kitchen job it's plain--
and her children call her Mom
but I wonder did she really do it more
than once.

No-nonsense life fights back in 10-pak
chicken thighs and 12-pak generic beer.
I thought her career would have taken off by now,
but her kitchen table still swims with Hamburger-Helper,
coupons and tins of soup with labels torn.

She writes in the evening in front of the TV,
curled up into herself like her body is the mystery
no man will ever know or pray or die for:
she's stronger than that.
She writes on 89-cent spiral tablets
with Bic pens about small endurable rage.

My friendship, my strangeness, my painted nails,
my body scented with raspberry bubblebath,
my hair coifed for the first male I spot looking back--
she writes of that.

Teresa White

Home

Poet Teresa White subordinates the Moon
to the creative urge to write.