Sit Back Down and Listen
women need to brave the recoil
of men who leave the room
when the talk turns to female troubles
of men who prefer female anatomy
to be naked prepubescent virtual enhanced
divorced from childbirth and
Blood
the word strikes fear when it drains from a woman
but fervor when it drains into the soil of a battlefield
you can’t win a medal unless you shed some
Blood
guts and glory they shout
watching carnage recreated on television
while keeping their appetite for snacks intact
but a man is a coward when it comes to
Blood
where tampons are needed and we ask him
to pick up a box if he’s going to costco
for motor oil and snacks anyway
but that cart with tampons between bags of cheetos
is a public admission he allowed his woman
to talk about
Blood
and didn’t leave the room
so man caves are less about sports and beer
and more about taboos and fear
of women who know that
between sex and birth
and fetuses
men never want spoken of again
women learn that the uterus can break
the monthly cycles
of fill and flush
can speed up to weekly
then daily
and the flow that a tampon once contained
gushes free to drench clothes and car seats
and fill a toilet with horrors of
Blood
that can only be stopped
by draining the body of almost half so
Blood
pressure drops and clots form
until their weight matches a cow’s liver
and gravity tears them
from the uterine wall then the
Blood
is free to flow again
and men are free
to leave the room that a woman
is trapped in alone
with her consciousness dimming
praying she won’t die that night
even though after all this
Blood
Loss
after all her men
have left the room
for all her years
she may have wanted to
So sit back down and listen
Experiments
A dozen newly hatched toads
were impossible for an eight year old to resist.
I captured them in a mason jar,
the lid carefully punched with holes.
I left the jar in the shade of the porch
when my mother called me to lunch.
The ‘slimy things’ weren’t allowed inside
so it could not have been my fault.
One half hour of shifting summer sun
caused a heat holocaust in my glass world.
My wards were lifeless casualties
that I cried about for years.
That summer my brother trapped a mouse in a jar
and rolled it down the grade
of the empty pool—despite my pleadings—
to see if it would go mad.
He went on to do graduate work in biology,
with no moral dilemmas or qualms
about lives spent trapped in glass tanks,
or cut short, preserved in jars.
I studied psychology, which, when done well,
doesn’t need a shelf of brains.
But I warn you I feel more compassion
for innocent species than man.
There is a trace of scientific detachment
lurking in my genes.
I may punch holes in your cranium
to release vaporous self-delusion.
My verbal scalpel may slice cerebral cross-sections
so I can count each ring of truth.
The bubble that seals you from jarring reality
may get rolled down a hard, steep slope
to see if it makes you sane.
Et Tu, Enterococcus
Over millennia, we charted an entangled course
of mutual survival and evolutionary symbiosis,
challenging each other to grow ever stronger
through times of war and detente.
Admittedly ours was the initial betrayal,
when a first glimpse through a microscope lens
revealed you, completely populating our fluid cosmos,
moving without limbs, multiplying without marriage.
But since we erroneously claimed these bodies as ours,
we vowed to eradicate your kind
with merciless warheads given gladiator names
like Cipro, Ceclor, and Suprax.
We blasted swathes of destruction in terrorist acts
with complete disregard to the consequences
of catastrophic casualties in micro-factories
to workers, maintenance crews, and security guards,
now proven essential for our mutual survival.
Bacteria will kill us all, one day,
or so I think waiting in the pharmacy line
for the newest antibiotic that may obliterate
or make invincible this warrior race
raging through my waterways.
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