My father’s last breath is still the blade 
that pares and cleaves me open. 
From the wound I cradle every beautiful thing:  

my friends’ laughter havocking the moonless night
cricket song spilling from an unfinished building.
In my hands the pastel rind of a grapefruit

plucked from the neighbor’s tree 
sour blush of its fruit plush beneath my nail’s parting. 
How to live knowing all of this will one day join him in the dirt 

and he will never see me beneath palm and palo verde:
my fingers long and lithe as his 
ripping pith from fruit. 

I slurp the good and bitter juice, 
drinking enough for both of us. 
Each night I’ll tell him what he’s missed: 

The tree’s golden litter of leaves 
the mourning doves’ daily song 
rung from branches thrust against the winter sky

too blue and too bright to bear.

my roommate one year in college
would say of my smallness 
that any man who found me attractive
had a trace of the pedophilic  


& i would shrink                    newly girled
twenty-one with my eyebrows
plucked to grownup arches             sprouting
back every three weeks  
in sharp little shoots             already men         
have tried to steal me


in their taxis   corral me into alleyways
of the new city            already
the demand  for my name              though
no one ever asks how old i am


though no one ever did      i feel creaking
& ancient in the repetition
of it all   i feel my girlhood gone for
generations    my entire
line of blood crowded with exhausted
women            their unlined faces 


frozen in time            with only a thickness
about the waist          a small shoot
of gray to belie the years


i make up names to hand
to strangers at parties  
i trim years from my age & share without
being asked    that i am
fifteen              seventeen      & no one blinks  
no one             stops wanting       


i am disappeared      like all the girls
before me    around me 
all the girls to come             


everyone thinks
i am a little girl & still
they hunt me               still they show their teeth        
i am so tired i am
one thousand  years old          one thousand
years older when touched

^{a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath}

I am doing nothing with my exile
of a life.

I go to the supermarket Saturday
on walks in the wilderness
of America on Sunday. I get thin.

I encourage the man I married
to work hard
at a career I don’t admire.

He is not sweet or funny.
He is as steady and strong as death.

I find myself horrified
of the future; the woman I want to be

is implausible. Voicing
my tender ideas is not possible.

The book of poems inside me
is desperate for morning.

’Tis the voice of the Sluggard: I heard him complain,
“You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again;”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides, and his shoulders, and his heavy head.

“A little more sleep, a little more slumber,”
Thus he wastes half his days and his hours without number;
And when he gets up he sits folding his hands,
Or walks about saunt’ring, or trifling he stands.

I pass’d by his garden, and saw the wild brier,
The thorn and the thistle, grow broader and higher.
The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags:
And his money still wastes, till he starves or he begs.

I made him a visit still hoping to find
He had took better care for improving his mind:
He told me his dreams, talk’d of eating and drinking;
But he scarce reads his Bible, and never loves thinking.

Said I then to my heart, “Here’s lesson for me;
That man’s but a picture of what I might be:
But thanks to my friends for their care in my breeding,
Who taught me betimes to love working and reading.