On Defining Rape to my Sixteen Year Old Daughter

My poetry is simply
one woman's story
There's no doubt
in my mind
when the soul enters
as Goddess of my Universe
I decide
whether by rape, incest
out of wedlock or within
troubled of happy
as Goddess of my Universe
I decide
a choice
I stand to lose
a prisoner of conscience
I may become.

and so I wrote
on defining rape to my 16 year old daughter
not the president
not the police
not the doctor
not the priest
as Goddess of my Univers
I decide.

On Defining Rape to my Sixteen Year Old Daughter

It was the fact that
she didn't spend the night with a girlfriend
as planned
she spent the night with a boyfriend
instead
that made me furious

"But mom, I didn't think anything would happen
or anyone would find our."

Of course not, darling
you were silence
you didn't tell a sour
and he did
first thing after he dropped you off
don't you know how boys talk?

It's not your virginity
it's your integrity
I feared lost
and baby
that's all we've got

You know what it is that mothers fear most?
it's not that you're made sweet love to
it's that he'll know all the right words
and make all the right moves
and that he'll want it
and you won't want to give it to him
and he'll take it anyway.

You know what that's called, darling?
Rape
and no one ever goes to jail for it
even though it's just as bad

and it's the fact that
it happens a lot
that makes me furious.
(c)1984

Equal Spread

Birth control is always an issue.  I so welcomed menopause.

 

Equal Spread

Well I just won’t do it

do sex anymore

but it’s all sex

my daddy said

if you want to keep your man

it’s all sex

you want to keep your man

don’t give him no cause to run around

it’s all sex baby

so I ask myself

what’s a woman to do

castrate, mutilate or self pollute

continue to try discipline and self control

or just don’t do it.

how many times have I laid upon that table

and spread my legs

fifteen times at least for each child

that’s sixty

once a year for twenty fertile years

that’s eighty

four cuts and stitches

pain killing shots and drugs

I even had the contents sucked out twice.

why

you’d think just once

he’d lay upon that table

spread his legs

and cut that flow.

© 1984

On Feeling Like a Shitty Mother

In 1984 I had just read Adrienne Rich's book "Of Woman Born."  She said that until women start writing the truth about there experience, no matter how painful, no one will know the truth about women.  So I did. 

On Feeling Like a Shitty Mother

Sitting at the kitchen table

my face is on fire

allergy

or is it stress?

I can barely write

my writst won’t move

we just took her to the airport

my fourteen year old daughter

she’s been living with her father

for the past nine years

one week just wasn’t enough

I  cried

I never cried before when she left

I tried to hold back the tears

what the fuck, I said

just let them flow

I cried for being such a shitty mother

for leaving her when she was five

for her wanting me to come back

and I never did

for not hearing her sing in the choir

for  not seeing her lead cheers

or play basket ball

for not being there when she came home from school

for not listening to her tell me what’s going on in her life

I cried

and the tears rolled down my face the salt set my skin on fire

What a wreck, I said

what a mess

red circles around puffy eyes

red streaks down each side my nose

and all along my jaw

one week just wasn’t enough

part II

sitting at the kitchen table

my face is on fire

my three year old asks me questions incessantly

what is this?

I keep writing

What is this?

I keep writing

I just don’t want to deal with him right now

What is this?  he asks again

 plunger, for when the toilet gets stopped up

but what is this?

and I snap

I just told you! it is a plunger

enunciating every syllable

wanting to scream

my face is on fire

I’m angry at this father

why is he here?

I want to call him up and demand his appearance

right now!

And when father finally arrives

son wants to play with him constantly

and I want to talk to father

and son and I fight for father’s attention

and father leaves

what’s the use?

of anything?

It’s a gray day

the kitchen’s a mess

as usual

my face is on fire

I have to talk to the IRS tomorrow

I am a delinquent taxpayer

and my bank account is overdrawn

I can’t pay you as much as I said I would

I told the woman on the phone

You mean you defaulted? She asks.

Well, yes, I guess so I answered

thinking how criminal that sounded

been spending too much time

worrying about who my husband was fucking

instead of tending to business

I wanted to tell her

But what did she care

We’re back to the old routine now

he’s not fucking her anymore

I gave him an ultimatum

It’s either her or me

I’m not risking any disease

Part III

mommie,  I’m hungry

I keep writing

mommie, I’m hungry

I keep writing

And he starts tugging at my arm

mommie I’m hungry

and I snap again

alright! What do you want?

a banana

more tears

and the salt burns

my face is on fire

and I cried again

for being such a shitty mother

© 1984

This is my first chapbook published in 1986.  I had to type it up, cut it up, paste it up and take it to Kinkos and make copies for the pages of the book.  The image is a drawing by Madelaine Enochs of a depression era photograph by Dorothea Lange. 



 

No Credit

No Credit

I’ve got no credit

they levied my account today

the IRS

took out all my money

can’t pay my bills

the money’s all gone

and I’m overdrawn

well then lady

you got no credit

can’t lend you no money

‘cause you got no credit

how come you don’t pay your taxes when due?

‘cause they’re too high

when you got babies

they’re too high

didn’t have no food

the day the taxes was due

so I used all the money

fed the babies instead

got no credit

and the baby got sick

took him to the doctor

and the doctor said

need my money today, lady

need my money today . . .

but

I haven’t got the money today

I said

I need help

You gotta job lady

you gotta W-2

no help for you

gotta be down and out

before the man

who pays the tax man

comes thru for you

maybe

business is good now

money comin’ in

pay the taxes every month

and the balance goes up

it’s penalty and interest

they say

I don’t send enough

their way

how do I get out of this mess? I ask

save save save my daddy said

save 10% says the book I read

Okay

okay

I will

business is slow now

snowed all day and the day before

gotta pay the rent

gotta pay for the heat

another baby’s comin’

can’t work all day

didn’t want my tubes tied

don’t want to suck it out

there’s gotta be another way

they levied my account again today

the IRS

took out all my money

how’d I get in this mess?

Is it too many babies?

Well I want to say

to the tas man

these babies aren’t

just for me

to the tax man

I want to say

in 25 years

when you’re old and gray

whose gonna change your bedpan?

©1986

Punk at three and a half

 

            Punk at three and a half

            We got a note from his teacher

            I mean, he’s only three and a half

            It’s the sillies, she said

            he’s got the sillies

            he won’t settle down

            and do his work

            he’s just too silly

            having too much fun

            he doesn’t seem to know

            what is socially unacceptable.

            I’ve been wondering what would happen

            all this freedom he’s been having

            I never say no

            unless

            it’s morally wrong

            or

            physically damaging.

            So this is how he turned out

            too silly.

            What is socially unacceptable, anyway?

            I ask.

            Playing in his food.

            Interesting, I say, considering

            his favorite friend is an artist

            and she calls food art

            and Hershey’s syrup food paint.

            Maybe he’s making food art?

            And about his hair

            maybe it would be better

            if he didn’t get it cut so short

            it disrupts the class

            the children gather ‘round him

            what did you do to your hair?  

            they ask

            and they all want to touch it.

            Oh my God

            they want to touch him?

            He’s the one who wants it cut so short

            do you think it could be

            he likes to be touched?

            So this is how he turned out

            too silly

            having too much fun

            and he likes to be touched

            What is socially unacceptable

            anyway?  (c) 1984

If you're the child of a writer you can expect that at some point you will be written about.  It's easier when the kids are young.  It gets harder as they get older.  I'm not sure why that is.  Maybe when they are younger it's expected that the parent will have opinions.  When the kids get older those opinions are more open for debate.  And it's not that you don't want to debate them.  Just not with your kids.

           

           

           

An Answer to a Child’s Cry

 

How do we answer all our children and grand children's question?  I wrote An Answer to a Child's Cry many years ago.  Recently my daughter, Dana, the mother of my grandson's pictured above, asked for a copy.  "You should make a blog of your poetry," she suggested.
 

An Answer to a Child’s Cry

You are unique, darlin’

Unique at this very moment

The way you dress

The way you write

The smile you share

You are an original

There are not duplicates

There is no one to compete with

You are unique

And you have a unique

Relationship with God

Your are meant to be eternal

To live forever

So listen

Listen to the distant echo

Calling to your soul

Be yourself and get

That this is it

There are no more tomorrows

Get that this is it

And the journey begins

The race is on

The choice yours

The goal faith

You know

The don’t worry

Everything will be all right faith

Get the faith

Get the don’t worry

And you’re home free

Get the this is it

Give thanks for what you’ve got

Imagine what you want

And you’re home free

Then your real life begins

Your life of growth

‘cause when you’re growing

you are living life to its fullest

and growth is where it’s at, darlin’

so take a chance and grow

there’s no need to worry

remember

you got the faith

you got the

don’t worry

every thing will be all right faith

being here now

is

the passage to growth

the passage growth

is

the way it is

the way it

is

this is it

get that this is it

and the journey begins

the growth begins

. . .and through it all

through all the growth

through all the change

who you are

remains the same

in the presence of change

. . .and the gift you give

is being committed

to doing good

to living love.

(c)1986

 

The Garden Girls as Performative Text

            “So what about meaning,” I asked.  “Can words by meaningless?”

            “Well, what do you think?” Fuchsia fired back.

            I told her it was arbitrary.  “Half of what we say we don’t know

            Because most of us are figuring it out as we go along.”

           

            Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez writes in her book El Teatro Campesino: “The great-man/text-centered/chronological-linear approach, a construct predominantly in Eurocentric history and print culture obscures more than it reveals.”  Her own writing emerges in dialogue and each chapter reveals facets of that dialogue.  She has been guided more by a concern with the dynamics of the El Teatro Campesino’s creative process than with a gathering of discrete facts.  When she met Felipe Anu, who worked his whole life as a migrant farm worker, he talks about the significance of memory in learning stories and in no particular order.

            “Well, perhaps I would get one or two bits from a clown.  And tomorrow . . . I would get another bit . . . And I would get ideas from the street . . . and my friends would tell me a joke, I would memorize it . . . It would stay in my head . . . and this is how I developed my sense of style.”

            Broyles-Gonzalez constantly affirms this shared communal nature and the process of free and constant sharing repudiating the dominant culture’s linear approach.  She positions her work “. . . within the Mexican working class tradition, orality and oral culture.”  I position The Garden Girls Lettersand Journal in a community of women, engaged in an ongoing saga, weaving words through simultaneous conversations.

                        Clove was the one who preached against knowing where you’re going.              “That’s not art,” she said, “that’s not living the creative life.  If you want             adventure, then you’ll have to give up planning ahead.”

                        Of course I can’t do that, not right away.  I would have to plan ahead             regarding not knowing for the rest of my life.

            Can I render my personal transformation becoming an artist, a physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual process in words alone?  My life does not have a linear overview.  To present it linearly obscures its complexity.  By creating an experiential reading the body is involved in the production of meaning.  The order is not rigidly fixed but subject to change dependent on numerous factors; the reader, the environment, the reader’s response.  The reader creates her own pacing, ritual, rhythm or beat.  An active reading occurs, a performance language of reading, a visual art, a performance art, a literary art.

                        When does it happen?  When does the voice of authority arrive, the thinking and speculating end and the assertion begin?

                        “Look at your hands,” Clove said.

                        “I think you mean it,” Rose said.

                        “Of course I mean it,” Clove said.

                        “Look at your hands, Rose, it’s all in your body, in the way you walk, the             way you smile, the way you think.  Look at your hands, take a deep breath and             you’ll find the words.”

            Sue-Ellen Case did not organize her book, Feminism and Theater, along either developmental or chronological lines.  Instead she organized it like a sampler of techniques, theories, positions, issues, explorations and practices.  Each chapter is complete in itself, allowing the reader either to read it in order or to pick out single selections.  She introduces new ideas such as personal theater as a means of extending the limits by considering the experiences of women as definitive.  Like Broyles-Gonzalez she presents a connection between a social movement and performative art.

            Case reveals how “women have excelled in the personal forms of dialogue: letters, in the sphere’s of written communication, and conversation, in that of the oral.  This personal dialogue is created by partners in production rather than by an absent author.”  Personal conversation is not removed from life.  It operates by enactment, and engaged dialogue, rooted in everyday life, the dialogue of present time.

                        “Can,” Lavendar asked, “intimacy occur without sex?”

                        “Well of course,” Echincea, Nettles and Clove responded quickly, with             authority.

                        “How?” I asked.  “I know about intimacy in sex.  That place of getting             close, real close, face to face.  Where you can feel and smell the breath.  Where             you can see the tiniest hairs on the stillest arm.  Where you can climb inside             another’s rhythm.  Where you have no other thought, but the thought of that             tender moment.  Where one’s pleasure is the pleasure of another.”

            Case reminds us “performance art produces its own genre where women can perform their own unique experience.  Women choose personal sites for their performances, explore new relationships to their own bodies and to their bodies of work.”  I have begun to look at my life as perfomative, my writing as an artist’s book, my letters as collaborative performances, myself as expert. The Garden Girls Letters and Journal is performative text on the page and is meant to be experienced. What if the reader claimed her power to ascribe meaning and that meaning was valid?  What if the reader is not meant solely to understand only the author’s meaning but is encouraged to create meaning in much the same way we try to ascribe meaning to a conversation we just happened upon?  This approach invites investigation further into questions of authority, power and questioning.  Can I be inserted in the body of my work?  In the Garden Girls I use the first person as a form of liberation from the impersonal and to expose layers of personal experience.

                        “And you don’t have intimate friends?” Clove asked.  “You don’t follow             the breath of your girlfriends, never letting your thoughts wander, your eyes dart?              You don’t watch her closely when she talks, noticing the newest gray hair, the             slightest wrinkle in her cheek?  You don’t hear the tiniest creak in her voice and             cackle in her smile?”

            I intend The Garden Girls to be considered as experts, in the moment, without a history that precedes them.  When Broyles-Gonzalez interviewed longstanding members of El Teatro she discovered “they had never been viewed as legitimate interpreters or experts of their own work and life experience.”  If we don’t contextualize our work, someone else will.  In order to substantiate the necessity for contextualizing ones own work Broyles-Gonzalez asks us to consider: “In seeking to characterize El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdes, kiddingly described it as ‘somewhere between Brecht and Cantiflas,’. . . and was promptly taken at face value by many critics . . . (who) avidly seized the European reference to Brecht . . .while discounting the Mexican reference and tradition.”

           

                        “Is your writing always so erotic?” Clove asked.

                        “Only when I get close to the bone,” Rose answered.  Getting close to the             bone is where passion rode.  Close to the bone in a simple conversation.

            El Teatro relied on a distinctly chincana/o aesthetic to affirm an alternative social vision.”  For the Garden Girls to affirm an alternative social vision their form is as significant as what they have to say. Broyles-Gonzalez frequently emphasizes this fact. “In reality oral culture is typically not just spoken words but words defined by their life in the world, hence inseparable from the context and from the body and voice that utters them.” 

            The Garden Girls’ personal dialogue plays out best to personal friends.  The question then becomes who is not a friend and how do I broaden my friendships to be more inclusive?   It’s the conversations and the dailiness of life that the girls are perfoming via being read individually, as letters, in no particular order, leaving open opportunity for the performative aspect by reader. Broyles-Gonzalez emphasizes, “Oral culture is by definition situational and not abstract . . . and involves not only words, but the entire body engaged in the dailiness of life.”

                        “When does talk become sex?” Clove asked.

                        “When the writing is close to the bone where the passion rides.”

                        Rose was frustrated, to say the least.  She knew by the way her words             paused, by how she was so careful what she spoke.

            Broyles-Gonzalez considers art as social action.  The art as object approach consumes, by means of various literary theories, without consideration of the social conditions of the writer or the reader.  When we look at the text linearly with an expectation of knowing what came before and significant character development, we can never truly experience the intimate connections between the texts and the actualities of human life and the activity that results in text.  Isn’t it equally valid and interesting to wonder about the suffering that went before? What is left unsaid is as interesting and vital.

            Like Leslie Labowitz’s performance art piece Sproutine where she waters her plants, nude, leads her audience to her garden, reads to them from The Secret Garden and feeds them sprouts, Broyles-Gonzalez wants to place the concept of orality at the center ot El Teatro. The Garden Girls seek to come to terms with their own self identity and place the concept of orality at the center of their letters to provide a necessary retreat, an opportunity for momentary surrender.