socked me for it,

I could have caressed myself off to sleep!

But at scrapbook time, biting with child

scissors along the dotted lines—

an Outfit! for skating!—I travailed without cease or

fuck to imitate the middle-class WASP, though

nothing availed to keep a best friend

alive, nothing vailed against punishment,

except, at last, to be so much taller than my

mother that if I had fought her I would have

won. So I kept cutting around

the tabs, fashioning costumes like sandwich

boards to hang onto girls. But when

the music began—all of a sudden,

8th grade, “Blueberry Hill”—

my body came alive, and moved,

and found its thrill.

Crazy Sharon Talks to the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road

and much said he—same old porridge

I heard as a child, my little body

a “foul sty.”

“Love has pitched his mansion.” Maybe

Love pitched her silken tent.

Love has raised its dwelling in

the place of reproduction, which can be

fitted with a full moon device

which functions as a saving grace.

And maybe everything can be rent,

everything can be sole or whole—like an

asshole. I met a Bishop, once,

when I was a teenager mad as hell about

eternal fire and birth control.

We were sitting in my mother’s living room—

for I have built my poems in

a place of fancy privilege—

I held out my fingers, and wiggled them at him,

and said, “I’m trying to make you levitate.”

He was not holding his crook, or his mitered

hat, but he was wearing a shirt

of magenta Egyptian cotton, woven and

dyed only for Bishops, and I said,

thinking myself

quite the brat,

“That is the most beautiful shirt

I have ever seen, could you get me a shirt

like that?”

Not seeing the privilege

and ignorance of coming from a living room

like that.

Ballad of Once Mike Carter

I like to wear

men’s shirts—

because my hands are so big—I like to roll

up the cuffs, and show a man’s hands

at the end of a girl’s arms. And my shoulders

so wide—in men’s shirts, my shoulders look

delicate—as if a man has

taken the shirt off his back and put it

around my shoulders. Once Mike Carter,

in his letter jacket, walking between

Liz Barshay, the beauty, and me,

downhill, after a high school game,

drew us into the arms of a blossoming

fruit-tree, and kissed first her, then me,

then her, then me. She had pointed breasts

like torpedoes, two bombes, and Egyptian eyes, and a

red, scimitar mouth, and I had

my wit, and my little Scottish lips,

and Mike had the softest most generous mouth,

and he was our class president.

She was girl height, I was almost as tall

as Mike,

my body like a nymph’s just grown up. With breaking-

open flowers around our heads,

we tasted the universe,

together,

and within that pistil thing between my

legs I broke into cherry blossom.

Cuckoo Ballad