Woman Things

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 Woman Things


I just read a poem by a friend, about anger—
the kind all us women folk tuck under our pillows 
at night.

The children, when they see it, call 
my Pony Boy hair “disgusting,” aghast 
at hydrogen peroxide’s power to take me somewhere they cannot go.

“Maybe you should have worn
a shirt.” My eight year old remarks,
a witness now to the record of space 
I held on a stage.

It takes a good night’s sleep before 
I realize it was my unbound breasts 
that flagged “danger” in her girl-
mind, and not the folds of skin 
around my armpits. 

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