Two Poems |
by Susan Deer Cloud |
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You Who Spread Your Legs You who spread your legs for CEO’s, presidents, vice-presidents, speakers of the patriarchal house – you women having sex with men who order the poor, the gullible, the desperate to do their dirty work in other lands, you, you, and you who spend your cheap days buying diamonds to match hearts no one can scratch, to glint like phony smiles, your fake fucking pretty, you women, what’s it like to do the dirty work you do, spread legs like cheerleader splits for the rich guys, the “set for life” guys who lie with no remorse, those “most likely to succeed” in raping women and all of Mother Earth and get away with it? You women who always refused to dance with poets, artists, guitar players, street boys, Indians literal and metaphorical, the going once, the going twice, the gone mad, how is it to betray your deepest part to the world’s top liars? Do the warmongers feel like bombs and rockets ripping into you? Or do those rulers feel like Zeus as coins making your insides 18 karat gold-immortal? Do you come together? Is it a big explosion? Do you ever cry for the women with the dead babies? The buried husbands? The once lovers passing for alive but dying inside old wounds? You women with boob jobs, the only jobs you’ve ever had, what’s it like to spread your liposuctioned thighs for the greedy? Do you lie back and think of Haliburton? In your respectability, plastic security, do you sometimes suspect you’re whores? Do the gods in suits own all of you? Do they do you the way they’ve done the rest of us? We who only wanted tenderness, joy? Do they fuck you up the ass, too? Ice Storm In the middle of the night she heard it – low chiming outside, earth music like crystal wine glasses falling, delicate shatterings waving empty across crusted snow. Maybe she was dreaming the bell-like breakings, except sliver of sky shimmered in the drunk dark, so she thought her eyes must be open, she must be awake beneath fern-green quilt a mountain grandmother made decades ago, “geese flying south” over naked skin, her nakedness and strange ice music glimmering like last love, while on Earth’s other side bombs were falling on sand and desert city. A woman lay there, also, listening to glass shattering, thinking Maybe I’m dreaming. Praying she and her babies breaking into a thousand pieces were not really awake, weeping for her nakedness to feel her man again as geese flying south – In the middle of the night she heard it. |
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