generously, over a seven-layer dip and the Super Bowl halftime show.
He and they together practiced opening bottles with teeth
and bracketing out the fine print around what they
are and are not contractually willing to commit.
Man bestowed these men with a brilliant sense of self defined by an organ,
and a brilliant sense of fear, defined by the need to keep this organ from being removed.
He and they walked around measuring their manhood
always with one eye on their neighbor's butter knife.
Woman was in the garden outside, alone,
reading a passage out of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal to child
tucked carefully in her gentle arm.
When child was hungry, it ate, and when Woman was sad, she wept,
leaving teardrops of cool saline tenderly upon the earth.
She called the drops 'dew,' when she explained them to child, and told it
mother nature wept when she was sad, just like Woman, just like mother did.
Man gave personhood to Woman slowly, thinking that
he had something to give her at all--a rib, he thought, suffrage--
and Woman held child with an arm so gentle and yet so strong,
Woman held the earth with an arm so gentle and yet so strong,
Woman held Man with an arm so gentle and yet so strong
that he could not see that it was she who granted personhood, by bestowing the beauty of breath.
Woman walked child through the trees in the garden,
humming a song she'd heard a mockingbird sing.
Child, with eyes like the sky at dawn, fell asleep in the comfort of that which was known and that which was beautiful.
Woman, with eyes like the sky at dusk, stayed away in the knowledge of that which was burning and that which was terrible.
There was smoke on the horizon, but child was asleep and Man was shouting at the television and Woman, tired of weeping, began to march.
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