UNIVERSIDAD CENTRAL DE VENEZUELA

Facultad de Humanidades y Educación

Escuela de Idiomas Modernos
Departamento de Inglés
Cultura, Temas y Textos 2
3rdTerm – 2015
Profesor Reygar Bernal

FEMINIST & LGBT POEMS:

A SELECTION
1.-Emily Dickinson
I’mNobody
I‟m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there‟s a pair of us — don‟t tell!
They‟d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

2.-Richard Blanco
Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother
Never drink soda with a straw—
milk shakes? Maybe.
Stop eyeing your mother‟s Avon catalog,
and the men‟s underwear in those Sears flyers.
I‟ve seen you . . .
Stay out of her Tupperware parties
and perfume bottles—don‟t let her kiss you,
she kisses you much too much.
Avoid hugging men, but if you must,
pat them real hard
on the back, even
if it‟s your father.
Must you keep that cat? Don‟t pet him so much.

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 Why don‟t you like dogs?
Never play house, even if you‟re the husband.
Quit hanging with that Henry kid, he‟s too pale,
and I don‟t care what you call them
those GI Joes of his
are dolls,
Don‟t draw rainbows or flowers or sunsets.
I‟ve seen you . . .
Don‟t draw at all—no coloring books either.
Put away your crayons, your Play-Doh, your Legos.
Where are your Hot Wheels,
your laser gun and handcuffs,
the knives I gave you?
Never fly a kite or roller skate, but light
all the firecrackers you want,
kill all the lizards you can, cut up worms—
feed them to that cat of yours.
Don‟t sit Indian style with your legs crossed—
you‟re no Indian.
Stop click-clacking your sandals—
you‟re no girl.
For God‟s sake, never pee sitting down.
I‟ve seen you . . .
Never take a bubble bath or wash your hair
with shampoo—shampoo is for women.
So is conditioner.
So is mousse.
So is hand lotion.
Never file your nails or blow-dry your hair—
go to the barber shop with your grandfather—
you‟re not unisex.
Stay out of the kitchen. Men don‟t cook—
they eat. Eat anything you want, except:
deviled eggs
Blow Pops
croissants (Bagels? Maybe.)
cucumber sandwiches
petit fours
Don‟t watch Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie.
Don‟t stare at The Six-Million Dollar Man.
I‟ve seen you . . .
Never dance alone in your room:
Donna Summer, Barry Manilow, the Captain
and Tennille, Bette Midler, and all musicals
—forbidden.
Posters of kittens, Star Wars, or the Eiffel Tower—

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 forbidden.
Those fancy books on architecture and arts—
I threw them in the trash.
You can‟t wear cologne or puka shells
and I better not catch you in clogs.
If I see you in a ponytail—I‟ll cut it off.
What? No, you can‟t piece your ear,
left or right side—
I don‟t care—
you will not look like a goddamn queer,
I‟ve seen you . . .
even if you are one.

Playing House with Pepín

He‟s the man and I‟m the girl, Beba,
though I‟m not supposed to be.
We live inPoghsquishy, in New York
where my cousin is from. It‟s pretty
and snows a lot up there, like he says.
My room is the house with a pink roof,
the most biggest one on Cucamonga Street.
I make Pepín pancakes on the dresser
andstrawberry Pop-Tarts in the lamp.
I give him a kiss just like my mom does
to my dad and he goes to work like him
in a gigan’ic building in the living room.
But he ain‟t got a car. He drives a horse
namedCharlie Horse with purple spots.
Our son‟s name is Succotash, he barks,
licksPepín‟s fingers when he gets home.
Hi sweetheart, I make him say and kiss me
like on the black-and-white TV shows.
He wants to cook us dinner; I tell him no
He can‟t—only the girl is supposed to.
How come? Just „cause, that‟s all I say
and go into the kitchen in the closet,
come out with cups of Kool-Aid wine,
slices of blue and red Play-Doh pizza.
It‟s deewishes, but Succotash won‟t eat.
I yell at him like my grandmother does:
Sit up like a man! Eat or no dessert for you!
Succotash runs away—he‟s a big sissy.
Pepín is tired. We brush our teeth
with my pencils and jump into bed.

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I turn off the lights like he asks me.
I ain‟t afraid of the dark or his eyes,
Or when I put his arm around me.
Good night, honey, I say, give him a kiss
on the lips just like in the soap operas,
but he doesn‟t say nothing. He likes it
whenwe play house, he hates it when
my dad comes in my room, real angry:
Who you talking to? What’s going on?

Love as if Love
Before I dared kiss a man, I kissed
Elizabeth. Before I was a man, I was
twenty-three and she was thirty-five,
a woman old enough to know songs
I didn‟t—and that we wouldn‟t last
beyond the six weeks spent drinking
sweet German wine off our lips,
candles burning and music lifting
off the black vinyl, easing the taboo
between us, barefoot and sprawled
on blankets over her studio floor.

She played The Mamas & The Papas,

Holiday, and Carole King, closed my eyes
withher fingers until the notes broke
in my palms and the room filled up
with the flicker of monarchs. She sang
her life to me in lyrics about running
like a river, about rain, fire. She sang
until I wasn‟t afraid of her loose hair,
the scent of lilacs creased in her neck,
her small bones in the space between
her breasts, until I dared undress her.

Before I ever took a man, I gave in

toElizabeth by the tiny green lights
of her stereo glowing like fireflies,
the turntable a shiny black moon
spinning with the songs I still hear
on the radio—driving and singing
straight into clouds moving farther
and farther away, but never quite
vanishing, like those nights falling

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asleep with her rooted in my arms,
loving her as if I could love her.

Killing Mark
His plane went down over Los Angeles
last week (again), or was it Long Island?
Boxer shorts, hair gel, his toothbrush
washed up on the shore at New Haven,
but his body never recovered, I feared.

Monday, he cut off his leg chain sawing—

bled to death slowly while I was shopping
for a new lamp, never heard my messages
on his cell phone: Where are you? Call me!
I told him to be careful. He never listens.

Tonight, fifteen minutes late, I‟m sure

he‟s hit a moose on Route 26, but maybe
he survived, someone from the hospital
will call me, give me his room number.
I‟ll bring his pajamas, some magazines.

5:25: still no phone call, voice mail full.

I turn on the news, wait for the report:
flashesof moose blood, his car mangled,
as I buzz around the bedroom dusting
the furniture, sorting the sock drawer.

Did someone knock? I‟m expecting

thesheriff by six o‟clock. Mr. Blanco,
I’m afraid . . . he‟ll say, hand me a Ziploc
with his wallet, sunglasses, wristwatch.
I‟ll invite him in, make some coffee.

6:25: I‟ll have to call his mom, explain,

arrange to fly the body back. Do I have
enough garbage bags for his clothes?
I shouldkeep his ties—but his shoes?
Order flowers—roses—white or red?

By seven-thirty I‟m taking mental notes

forhis eulogy, suddenly adorning all
I‟ve hated, ten years worth of nose hairs
in the sink, of lost car keys, of chewing

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too loud and hogging the bedsheets,

when Joey yowls, ears to the sound

offootsteps up the drive, and darts
to the doorway, I follow with a scowl:
Where the hell were you? Couldn’t call?
Translation: I die each time I kill you.

3.-Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
Aunt Jennifer‟s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer‟s fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle‟s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer‟s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hand will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid

Afterward
Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand
At last believing and resigned,
And none of us who touch your hand
Know how to give you back in kind
The words you flung when hopes were proud:
Being born to happiness
Above the asking of the crowd,
You would not take a finger less.
We who know limits now give room
To one who grows to fit her1 doom.

1
When the poem appeared in A Change of World, the phrase read “his doom.” Amending the phrase in Poems:
Selected and New the poet noted: “I have altered the [pronoun] not simply as a matter of fact but because [it alters],
for me, the dimensions of the poem.”

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 An Unsaid Word
She who has power to call her man
From that estranged intensity
Where his mind forages alone,
Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
And when his thoughts to her return
Stands where he left her, still his own,
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,

with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin2 prelude
called by Cortot:3 “Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory.”4

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she‟s let the tapstream scald her arm,
a match burn to her thumbnail,

2
Frederic Francoise Chopin (1810-49), Polish composer and pianist who settled n Paris in 1831.
3
Alfred Cortot (1877-1962), famous French pianist.
4
Cortot‟s notation for Prelude No. 7, Andantino, A Major, in the prefatory remarks of his Chopn: 24 Preludes (Paris,
1930).

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or held her hand above the kettle‟s snout
right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each morning‟s grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores5
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
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the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea7 beneath flat foxes‟ heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies8 cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam,9 all the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
masemblable, ma soeur!10

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:

their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .
reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—11
in that Amherst12pantrywhile the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

5
Literally, “times and customs,” alluding perhaps to Cicero‟s phrase “O Tempora! O Mores!” in Pro RegeDeiotaro
2.31 (Alas! For the degeneracy of our times and the low standard of our morals!”).
6
Remedies for menstrual pain.
7
British queen in the time of the Emperor Nero who lead her people in a large though finally unsuccessful revolt
against Roman rule.
8
Greek goddesses of vengeance.
9
Feminine version of the phrase “ad hominem,” referring to an argument that appeals to personal interests,
prejudices, or emotions rather than to reason or justice.
10
The last line of the poem “Au Lecteur” by Charles Baudelaire addresses “Hypocritelecteur!—monsemblable,—
mon frère!”: “Hypocrite reader, like me, my brother”—not as here, “my sister.”
11
Poem 754 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson.
12
The Massachusetts town in which Emily Dickinson lived (1830-86)

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 5.

Dulce ridens, dulceloquens,13

she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings14

neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping
over her cheek, only the song
of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—
is this fertilisantedouleur?15 Pinned down
by love, for you the only natural action,
are you edged more keen
toprise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?

7.

“To have in this uncertain world some stay

which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence.”16
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
Hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,17

13
Latin for “sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking.” Hirace (Quintus HoratiusFlaccus), Ode 22, Integer vitae.
14
First line of a poem by Thomas Campion (1567-1620).
15
French for “fertilizing or life-giving sorrow.”
16
From Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts of the Education of Daughters, London, 1787 [Rich‟s note].
17
Denis Diderot (1713-84), French philosopher, encyclopedist, playwright, and critic. “You all die at fifteen”:
“Vousmoureztoutes a quinzeans,” from the Lettresà Sophie Volland, quoted by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième
Sexe, Vol. II, pp. 123-24 [Rich‟s note].

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and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we were—fire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition—
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

Not that it is done well, but

that it is done at all?18 Yes, think
of the odds! or shrugs them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time‟s precious chronic invalid,—
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us—
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,

Tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.

10.

Well,
she‟s long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy

18
An allusion to Samuel Johnson‟s remark to Boswell: “Sir, a woman‟s preaching is like a dog‟s walking on his
hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all” (July 31, 1763, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

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or helicopter,19
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.

1958-1960

Planetarium
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
Astronomer, sister of William;20 and others

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

A woman „in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments
of measuring the ground with poles‟

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

19
“She comes from the remoteness of ages, from Thebes, from Crete, from Chichén-Itzá; and she is also the totem
set deep in the African jungle; she is a helicopter and she is a bird; and there is this, the greatest wonder of all: under
her tinted hair the forest murmur becomes a thought, and words issue from her breasts” (Simone de Beauvoir, The
second sex).
20
In helping her brother, William (1738-1822), the discoverer of Uranus, Caroline Herschel became a superb
astronomer in her own right.

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 „virile, precise and absolutely certain‟21
from the mad webs of Uranusborg

•
encountering the NOVA22
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

„Let me not seem to have lived in vain‟23

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive24

Heartbeat of the pulsar25

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus26

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic27 cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body

21
Phrase used by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) to describe his own observations, but also
applicable to the work of Caroline Herschel.
22
Uranienborg, “castle in the sky,” was the name of the observatory built in 1576 by Brahe. On November 11, 1573,
Brahe discovered the famous “New Star” in Cassiopeia.
23
Brahe‟s last words.
24
Alludes to 7.144 of the Qur‟an: “And when his Lord manifested Himself on the mountain, He broke it into pieces
and Moses fell down unconscious.”
25
Celestial object emitting pulses of radio waves, generally thought to be a remnant of a supernova, or exploding
star.
26
The constellation in the Northern Hemisphere near Orion and Aries, also Rich‟s astrological sign.
27
Of, pertaining to, occurring in, or originating in the Milky Way.

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and the reconstruction of the mind. 1968
The stranger
Looking as I‟ve looked before, straight down the heart
of the street to the river
walking the rivers of the avenues
feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt
watching the lights turn on in the towers
walking as I‟ve walked before
like a man, like a woman, in the city
my visionary anger cleansing my sight
and the detailed perceptions of mercy
flowering from that anger

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

and hear them talking a dead language
if they ask me my identity
what can I say but
I am the androgyne28
I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
the lost noun, the verb surviving
only in the infinitive
the letters of my name are written under the lids
of the new born child
1972

Re-forming the Crystal

I am trying to imagine
how it feels to you
to want a woman

trying to hallucinate
desire
centered in a cock
focused like a burning-glass

desire without discrimination:

to want a woman like a fix

Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of „flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in
the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to

28
One who has male and female characteristics physically or, as intended here, psychologically.

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meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy. But knowing all along that
you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on
the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred
ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.

Tonight is a different kind of night.

I sit in the car, racing the engine,
calculating the thinness of the ice,
In my head I am already threading the beltways
that rim this city,
all the old roads that used to wander the country
having been lost.
Tonight I understand
my photo on the license is not me,
my
name on the marriage-contract was not mine.
If I remind you of my father‟s favorite daughter,
look again. The woman
I needed to call my mother
was silenced before I was born.

Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out on sheet-ice. I want to understand my
fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can
compare it with the greatest of those accidents. But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a
cold engine, cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting into the field of a poem wired with
danger, or to a trip through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night of female memory, where
delicately and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes upon the ribs of the volcano the name
of the one she has chosen.
1973

Power
Livingin the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie29

she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element

29
Polish-born chemist and physicist (1864-1934) who, after coming to France and marrying Pierre Curie, did
pioneering research on radioactivity. The Curies discovered radium and isolated it from pitchblende. Marie Curie
was the first person to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice.

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she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying

her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
1974

The Phenomenology of Anger (2 Fragments)

4. White light splits the room.
Table. Window. Lampshade. You.

My hands, sticky in a new way.

Menstrual blood
seeming to leek from your side.

Will the judges try to tell me

which was the blood of whom?

9. The only real love I have ever felt

was for children and other women.
Everything else was lust, pity,
self-hatred, pity, lust.
This is a woman‟s confession.
Now, look again at the face
of Botticelli‟s Venus,30 Kali,31
the Judith of Chartres32
with her so called smile.

30
The reference is to The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1447?-1510); the painting is now in the Uffizi Gallery,
Florence.
31
Hindu goddess, wife of Shiva, often depicted dancing triumphantly on his body.
32
On the north portal of Chartres cathedral is a series of scenes depicting Judith‟s decapitation of the Assyrian
general Holofernes (Book of Judith 8-13).

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