The bees came round their heads, the wrens made talk.
Four young ladies each with a rainbow board
Honed their knuckles, wrung their wrists to red,
Tossed back their braids and wiped their aprons wet.
The Jersey calf beyond the back fence roared;
And all the soft day, swarms about their pet
Buzzed at his big brown eyes and bullish head.
Four times they rinsed, they said. Some things they starched,
Then shook them from the baskets two by two,
And pinned the fluttering intimacies of life
Between the lilac bushes and the yew:
Brown gingham, pink, and skirts of Alice blue.
Madam and Her Madam
LANGSTON HUGHES
I worked for a woman,
She wasn’t mean—
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.
Had to get breakfast,
Dinner, and supper, too—
Then take care of her children
When I got through.
Wash, iron, and scrub,
Walk the dog around—
It was too much,
Nearly broke me down.
I said, Madam,
Can it be
You trying to make a
Pack-horse out of me?
She opened her mouth.
She cried, Oh, no!
You know, Alberta,
I love you so!
I said, Madam,
That may be true—
But I’ll be dogged
If I love you!
Letters from Storyville
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
December 1910
Miss Constance Wright
I Schoolhouse Road
Oakvale, Mississippi
My Dearest Constance,
I am not out-of-doors as you feared,
and though I’ve had to tuck the blue, wool suit
you gave me, I do now have plenty to eat.
I have no doubt my decision will cause you
much distress, but still I must tell you—
when I had grown too weary to keep up
my inquiries and my rent was coming
due, I had what must be considered
the good fortune to meet Countess P—,
an elegant businesswoman who offered
me a place in her house. I did not accept
then, though I had tea with her—the first
I’d had in days. And later, too hungry
to reason, I spent the last of my purse
on a good meal. It was to her that I went
when I had to leave my hotel, and I am
as yet adjusting to my new life.
This first week I sat—as required—
each evening in the parlor, unnoticed,
the “professor” working the piano
into a frenzy, a single cockroach
scaling the flocked-velvet wallpaper.
The men who’ve come have called only
on the girls they know—their laughter
trailing off behind them, their gowns
floating past the balustrade. Though
she’s said nothing, Countess is indeed
sympathetic. Just the other night
she introduced me to a longtime client
in hopes that he’d take a liking to me.
I was too shy to speak and only pretended
to sip the wine he’d ordered. Of course,
he found me dull and soon excused himself
to find another girl. Part of me was
quite relieved, though I knew I could not
earn a living that way.
And so, last night
I was auctioned as a newcomer
Countess knows well the thing from which
I’ve run. Many of the girls do too,
and some of them even speak of a child
they left behind. The auction was a near
quiet affair—much like the one Whitman
described, the men some wealthy “gentlemen”
from out of town. Countess announced
that I recite poetry, hinting at a more dignified
birth and thus a tragic occasion for my arrival
at her house. She calls me Violet now—
a common name here in Storyville—except
that I am the African Violet for the promise
of that wild continent hidden beneath
my white skin. At her cue, I walked slowly
across the room, paused in strange postures
until she called out, Tableau vivant, and
I could again move—all this to show
the musical undulation of my hips, my grace,
and my patience which was to mean
that it is my nature to please and that I could,
if so desired, pose still as a statue for hours,
a glass or a pair of boots propped upon my back.
And then, in my borrowed gown
I went upstairs with the highest bidder.
He did not know to call me
Ophelia
Lineage
MARGARET WALKER
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?
I Want You Women Up North to Know
TILLIE OLSEN
(Based on a Letter by Felipe Ibarro in New Masses, Jan. 9th, 1934)
i want you women up north to know
how those dainty children’s dresses you buy
at macy’s, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,
down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”
I want you women up north to see
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
“exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats”
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting flesh.
Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
body shriveled to a child’s at twelve,
catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.
A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat
breaks over her body,
and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.
White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,
white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
white lightning, threading the clouds,
this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,
and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
like skeleton’s bones clattering,
is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance
of her fingers,
and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain.
Three dollars a week,
two fifty-five,
seventy cents a week,
no wonder two thousand eight hundred ladies of joy
are spending the winter with the sun after he goes down—
for five cents (who said this was a rich man’s world?) you can
get all the lovin you want
“clap and syph aint mu
ch worse than sore fingers, blind eyes, and
t.m.”
Maria Vasquez, spinster,
for fifteen cents a dozen stitches garments for children she has
never had,
Catalina Torres, mother of four,
to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to
night.
Mother of four, what does she think of,
as the needle pocked fingers shift over the silk—
of the stubble-coarse rags that stretch on her own brood,
and jut with the bony ridge that marks hunger’s landscape
of fat little prairie-roll bodies that will bulge in the
silk she needles?
(Be not envious, Catalina Torres, look!
on your own children’s clothing, embroidery,
more intricate than any a thousand hands could fashion,
there where the cloth is raveled, or darned,
designs, multitudinous, complex and handmade by Poverty
herself.)
Ambrosa Espinoza trusts in god,
“Todos es de dios, everything is from god,”
through the dwindling night, the waxing day, she bolsters herself
up with it—
but the pennies to keep god incarnate, from ambrosa,
and the pennies to keep the priest in wine, from ambrosa,
ambrosa clothes god and priest with hand-made children’s dresses.
Her brother lies on an iron cot, all day and watches,
on a mattress of rags he lies.
For twenty-five years he worked for the railroad, then they laid him off
(racked days, searching for work; rebuffs; suspicious eyes of
policemen.)
goodbye ambrosa, mebbe in dallas I find work; desperate swing
for a freight,
surprised hands, clutching air, and the wheel goes over a
leg,
the railroad cuts it off, as it cut off twenty-five years of his life.)
She says that he prays and dreams of another world, as he lies
there, a heaven (which he does not know was brought to earth
in 1917 in Russia, by workers like him).
Women up north, I want you to know
when you finger the exquisite handmade dresses
what it means, this working from dawn to midnight,
on what strange feet the feverish dawn must come
to maria, catalina, ambrosa,
how the malignant fingers twitching over the pallid faces jerk them
to work,
and the sun and the fever mounts with the day—
long plodding hours, the eyes burn like coals, heat jellies the
flying fingers,
down comes the night like blindness.
long hours more with the dim eye of the lamp, the breaking
back,
weariness crawls in the flesh like worms, gigantic like earth’s in
winter.
And for Catalina Rodriguez comes the night sweat and the blood
embroidering the darkness.
for Catalina Torres the pinched faces of four huddled
children,
the naked bodies of four bony children,
the chant of their chorale of hunger.
And for twenty eight hundred ladies of joy the grotesque act gone
over—
the wink—the grimace—the “feeling like it baby?”
And for Maria Vasquez, spinster, emptiness, emptiness,
flaming with dresses for children she can never fondle.
And for Ambrosa Espinoza—the skeleton body of her brother on
his mattress
of rags, boring twin holes in the dark with his eyes to the image of
christ
remembering a leg, and twenty-five years cut off from his life by
the railroad.
Women up north, I want you to know,
I tell you this can’t last forever.
I swear it won’t.
PS Education
ELLEN HAGAN
Take all the metal detectors apart and build imaginary cities with them. Then my 7th graders can build a utopia and walk around in it. Tell Harold, the security guard, who sings only Tito Puente songs, that he can have his own music room, and buy gold trumpets and trombones that slide like hot oil. Buy drums that rumble the whole school: da-dum, da-dum. Build a garden as big as the football field at Taft High School and feed everything. Tell Myles he can have a quiet room to fall asleep in, because I know he is tired. I know you are tired, Myles, but you cannot keep calling Russell a fat fuck, “Yo Russell, you fat fuck,” over and over until Russell has to stand up and punch Myles where he deserves it most. And why not? Call Russell a genius, who sure knows how to write about his grandma and the shiny wheelchair she rolls in. Tell Shelquan to get down from the air conditioner. He is singing, “This is why I’m hot,” with sunglasses he stole from Crystal, whose best friend Kiara has carved the word HATE in her arm. Remind Crystal and her girl Kiara that a woman should never mark her body with a word meant to destroy. Yell at them loudly and when Crystal’s nana shows up at the school, tell her anyway, even though she does not speak English and Crystal might not translate. She might. Tell Yaneira that she is a hot skillet when she writes, and not a “retard,” which is what Eduardo calls her under his breath. A fire woman. Really. And when Fatumata stops you in the street in front of the McDonald’s to say good morning, tell her she is late again, but yes, good morning. And tell her to get out of 339, or ask her to help you make it better. You know she can. Listen to Racheal’s poem over and over again. She needs it when Angel, who you cannot believe has turned on you, makes fun of the lilt in her voice, stare him down with your witchy eyes. Tell him, teach him how to say, “I will look at you Racheal and I will see you,” 1,000 times over. Racheal, where Trinidad and Guyana meet. Tell her the truth, that you never knew where she was from until you asked, and when you finally asked it was way later than you wanted. Put the principal in class with all the run-down teachers, no pencils, paperless notebooks. Don’t give him books because you know he is lazy. Call him lazy. Because he is. Make him walk in and out of the metal detectors, saying, “Next school year I will do better, and serve you better.” Make him mean it. Show up. Pencils and papers at the ready.
At the Café
PATRICIA KIRKPATRICK
after Adelia Prado
I must look like I’m confident,
white cup for tea on the table before me,
my son in his indigo bunting,
asleep in the stroller.
When I take out my pen
I must look like a woman
who knows what her work is
while citron and currant
bake in ovens behind me.
Newspaper, lily—
I read in the book that poetry is about the divine.
God came to the window while I was in labor.
Tenderness, tenderness!
I have never forgotten that
sparrow among the clay tiles.
Who knows my name knows I mash
oatmeal, change diapers,
want truly to enter divinity.
God knows it too, knows that
wherever I go now I leave out
some part of me.
I watch my son’s face like a clock;
he is the time I have.
If I choose this window, this black-and-white notebook,
I must appear to be what I am:
a woman who has chosen a table
between her sleeping child
and the beginning of everything.
Worked Late on a Tuesday Night
DEBORAH GARRISON
Again.
Midtown is blasted out and silent,
drained of the crowd and its doggy day.
I trample the scraps of deli lunches
some ate outdoors as they stared dumbly
or
hooted at us career girls—the haggard
beauties, the vivid can-dos, open raincoats aflap
in the March wind as we crossed to and fro
in front of the Public Library.
Never thought you’d be one of them,
did you, little lady?
Little Miss Phi Beta Kappa,
with your closetful of pleated
skirts, twenty-nine till death do us
part! Don’t you see?
The good schoolgirl turns thirty,
forty, singing the song of time management
all day long, lugging the briefcase
home. So at 10:00 PM
you’re standing here
with your hand in the air,
cold but too stubborn to reach
into your pocket for a glove, cursing
the freezing rain as though it were
your difficulty. It’s pathetic,
and nobody’s fault but
your own. Now
the tears,
down into the collar.
Cabs, cabs, but none for hire.
I haven’t had dinner; I’m not half
of what I meant to be.
Among other things, the mother
of three. Too tired, tonight,
to seduce the father.
The Age of Great Vocations
ALANE ROLLINGS
You’ve seen the skirts go up and down
In bread lines, soup lines, cheese lines, shanty towns.
No one can say you aren’t seeking work.
The answers come by mail at noon: No interview.
The best companies never respond; you respect them.
Some days, you don’t bother to open the letters,
Just tear them to bits and go out for a walk.
It’s a small fraud by the world’s standard:
You can’t do things like ask for directions,
So you call yourself an adventure-collector.
Failure’s a field with real opportunities
For a girl with a pile of business magazines
Which she will probably have to burn for heat.
Your luck will get either worse or better.
The world is none of your business;
It doesn’t give you a living.
Someone calls your bluff, asks for references.
You read up on yourself in the library.