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.