Redneck Speaks to My Condition

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My folks had a chicken farm in rural Robbinsville, NJ in the middle 1940s.

I know what it is like to use a burlap sack as a sunshade or umbrella and pick potatoes out of the ground all morning. The Sun is brutal. After I started crying, my folks put me in the barn where I could harass the kittens. I was four maybe. And they went back to picking.

My parent's grew Tomatoes for Campbell's Soup in Camden and Eggs and Chickens for all comers.

So even though I am an immigrant's Pole/Wop child from New Jersey, I claim honorable redneck status. I know about ridicule because you talk funny. I know about living off the Earth and reading books. Jeffersonian. This man speaks to my condition.

Traditional Art / Paintings / Still Life©2016 ab39z

I Loves Me Some Nasty Women. Been there and done that.

Always Unsuitable

She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.
They were grinning politely and evenly at me.
Unsuitable they smirked. It is true

I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts
too big for the silhouette. She knew
at once that we had sex, lots of it

as if I had strolled into her diningroom
in a dirty negligee smelling gamy
smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry

on my neck. I could never charm
the mothers, although the fathers ogled
me. I was exactly what mothers had warned

their sons against. I was quicksand
I was trouble in the afternoon. I was
the alley cat you don't bring home.

I was the dirty book you don't leave out

for your mother to see. I was the center-
fold you masturbate with then discard.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered
and survived, scared them, and where
I would go they never imagined.

Ah, what you wanted for your sons
were little ladies hatched from the eggs
of pearls like pink and silver lizards

cool, well behaved and impervious
to desire and weather alike. Mostly
that's who they married and left.

Oh, mamas, I would have been your friend.
I would have cooked for you and held you.
I might have rattled the windows

of your sorry marriages, but I would
have loved you better than you know
how to love yourselves, bitter sisters.

Copyright 1999 Early Grrrl: the Early Poems of Marge Piercy Leapfrog Press