"What Do Women Want?" - Kim Addonizio

[http://users.livejournal.com/_honeyspider/]

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

1 by Emily Dickinson

[treelife.livejournal.com]

 
SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host 5
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear 10
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

"It is the Living Who Cannot ..." // Hilda Morley

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

It is the living who cannot

live without the dead,

                                    who wish them

back,

          who need their presences,

their hands,

                   as Orpheus

held her hand, Eurydice’s,

to lead her

back to earth out of

the gulf of Hades,

                            as I

need yours

                  It is not so much

the dead

               who need us

now

      (as we think they do)

                                    & that reconciliation

we long for, that knowledge

of each other to the uttermost,

which could assuage us,

                                     they are

one step beyond it & suffer us

to long for them.

                           If they could

return, it would be out of

patience with us merely: their need to

console us. For somehow an indifference

possesses them, for all their tenderness

& they see beyond us,

                                  even if

what they see seems to us

nothing