Poem 4, Week 13

When the doctor asked me if I wanted to see the inside
of my cervix I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be bad,
like seeing a cut you made on your hand and trying not to
retch as the moist, white flaps of skin begin to bleed
or like watching a pre-med student extract a needle
from your arm after deciding it was time to “give back”
at the town blood drive. No, the causal turn of my head
to the monitor at my left proved that looking at my cervix
was no more nauseating than staring at a wad of saliva
soaked pink gum or observing what I imagine
the inside of an octopus would look like if sliced opened
and the interior of it’s slick flesh were left on a table--
as if it were a book the owner set down to answer the phone.

In 1956 William Masters and Virginia Johnson invented a sex
machine that filmed a woman from the inside, a hobby horse
with a penis endowed to record. They wanted to see a woman’s
full cycle, comparable, at the time, to her intimate relationship
with the washing machine. It was all to find penile traction
on the labia minora, to find how a woman orgasms, constantly
Asking how does that feel, miss? So when the doctor asks me
If I can feel camera as it searches for cancer, I tell him, no,
it’s about as exciting as doing the laundry. I watch
as it plunges further in the folds of pink valleys searching
For that bit of white flesh hiding from removal.
There is nothing sexy about this,
said 99% of the woman that subjected themselves to Masters
and Johnson’s spin cycle--it was all for science, for the future
benefit of others. That’s what my doctor tells me anyway
when he zones in on a patch of white tissue and claps his hands
in victory. I take a good, hard look at the screen and determine
this is the last time I ever want to see myself from the inside.

Poem 3, Week 12

When she was a girl she hated everything
except girls, except her schoolmate, Sarah.
nothing good can come from kissing
something like a boy, so even Lola with feet

like a boy’s, she hated too. Sarah tied yarn
the color of toasted almonds in her hair

and worn holey knee highs that stopped
just under her thighs. Her thighs so pale
they yelled for eyes to drift from blackboard

to their brightness, so delicious, like a sugared pear.
In college the touching began, first hands, then lips,

then Joan was her first lover. They told jokes
about the girls in their hall, smoked joints
in the closet often after hours of sex on Joan’s bed.

She never wiped her mouth after it grazed over Joan’s
body, just above her knees, but cried for days when her lover

took a boyfriend, and stopped coming to her dorm.
next semester she met Joan in the courtyard

next to the main gate. Joan was two months pregnant
and wanted to have sex with her one more time.
She slapped Joan in the face and said, Yes…please,

one more time.

Poem 2, Week 11

Power

I forgot to tell you about my love affair
with racism. The man who took my virginity
had a iron cross on the left side of his chest
and a bat in the trunk of his Mustang. He told me
the first time he shaved his head was in California-
his brother's in prison out there and they all have guns,
he said. We had sex on the couch, I bled on the sofa.
I always wondered if he hated me

the way he hated the spics who put his brother in jail.
I know now I loved him the way a woman might love
a man who beats here, I thought hate would be good in bed.
Psychologist say all women have rape fantasies-
to be dominated, to be guilty of nothing.
Maybe that's why I found it okay to sleep with a man
who beat people with off-white skin, I wasn't the one
holding the bat. I had a dirty desire for that blood
on the couch, I had a dirty want for the wrong of it all.

Poem 1, Week 10

Mouth to Mouth

Never was a cornflake girl.
Tori Amos, Cornflake Girl

It should not alarm you that I despise
something other than myself. I’m not

a feminist for nothing or else all those Tori
Amos songs taught me zilch about owning

a vagina. Yeah, sometimes I peruse through
the make-up aisle and think about lip gloss

and how nice it would be to dab its glistening
guarantee of sex on my dry mouth. But then

I remember that when I turn my head too fast
my hair sometimes gets stuck in this new cosmetic

radiance on my face and I want to go back to the bare
essentials of my own matte lips. I have always loved

experimenting with you and your love for me.
You always tease me about my reflection

and how you catch me looking at it after a bath--
how I still turn sideways and suck in my tummy,

how I won’t dye my hair, but I still paint my nails.
I look forward to the day when I can like the thought

of liking myself without the need for any woman
with unshaved or plastic body parts to tell me

what I should be. I wonder what the first woman
was like before other women came along. I wonder

who told her how to be?

Pedagogy forum, Week 9

I am really finding ‘The Writing Experiment’ by Smith hard to follow, and maybe overall, not to helpful. I don’t think this is a text that I would be interested in using in the future to teach creative writing. First, for beginning writers I would imagine that it is not completely accessible. I find it hard to access even after writing for several years now. There are sections for beginners and those whom Smith would conclude to be more advanced, yet I feel that the book does not give me a great deal of material to work with. The few exercises that I have attempted to try from this text do not produce much workable material for me. And although this is true of a lot of other exercises I find the ones included in this book not fruitful. I was wondering how others in the class felt about this text—those both new and experienced to writing and how or if (those who teach) find anything useful in it to teach young writers?

Calisthenics, Week 9

Gathering lanaguge from various nonfiction texts, like the excerise we did in class.
I like this excerise and find it very helpful in locating unexpected lanuage and pairings.

Plotting the plotless,
the world includes all of us, but this book does not.
This item-I hesitate to use the word document- has unearthed
the performer, chooses between alternative pitches for each letter.
Well today, with such rushings, went without mailing
arm in arm, they scurried off before the waitress could return with God.
New York allowed me to take three months in the middle of 1972,
how readers could see beyond the ethnic and the immigrant
spring became summer, Louise left Key West for good on June.
Some acids are burned off during the roasting process,
yet, the task of rescuing language from the bad prose of patriotism,
Upper-class English diction with its sharpened vowels, elisions, and modish slurs,
The dead house is stuffed. The stuffing is alive. It is sinful.
locating the split in the poem, however, is not that easy.

Sign Inventory, Week 9

Victim Number 48
-Mahmoud Darwish

•The poem is concerned with detailing permanence: death, darkness, prison, tattoos, mourning.
•The poem is also concerned with detailing imprisonment: prison, boxes, no travel pass.
•The victim has only a mother and a brother mentioned—the poem details the loss of familial ties with the death of the victim.
•The crime for which the victim is killed is never divulged.
•There are details of the flora or terrestrial in connection with the victim: a lamp of roses, dead upon the stones, boxthorn.
•There is also a jump from the terrestrial to the celestial with the repeated imagery of the moon.
•The speaker’s relation to the victim and the family is unknown, but he does claim ownership to his country: my country, placing himself akin to the victim if only nationally.
•The “they” who find the victim is also unclear and their relation to the speaker and/or the state.
•A travel pass is repeated—either one is in possession of one or not.
•There is also an importance of carrying items in this poem: the victim carries piastres, matches, a travel pass and his brother carries a box of garbage and other boxes.