I am an inconvenient woman…

Lately I’ve been falling in love with Marge Piercy’s poems all over again…

An excerpt from “The nuisance”

I am an inconvenient woman.
I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or a cash register.
I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf coming in
or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.
I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.
I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.
I love when you are discussing changes in the class structure
and it jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers…

I love you with my arms and my legs
and my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.
I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.
I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.
I want to read you poems about drowning myself
laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelley’s wings
I want you to read my old loverletters.

I want you to want me
as directly and simply and variously
as a cup of hot coffee.
To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.
I carry my love for you
around with me like my teeth
and I am starving.