for women of a certain age.

Rage, rage. Do not go into that good night

wearing sensible white or beige.

Women who have squash-

blossomed into soft flesh,

and grieve the frothy loss of the interior

garments of youth.

Rage, rage. Do not go into that good night

wearing sensible white or beige.

Gone the black-lace architecture of the past,

the thong, bikinis, hipsters, G-strings. Gone, gone.

The underwire and lace push-up cups

replaced with feed sacks and ace

bandage straps. Pachydermian.

Prosthetic. A cruel aesthetics.

Rage, rage. Do not go into that good night

wearing sensible white or beige.

Excellent women, who in wise vision flower,

blaze, scintillate in your finest era.

Refuse the misnomer “Intimate Apparel.”

For what lies beyond XL or 36C is

the antithesis of intimacy.

Garments sent to exile ánimas solas

to the Siberia of celibacy.

To sleep with dogs or cats

instead of lovers.

Oh, La Perla, why hast thou forsaken us?

Will no one take pity and design foundations, nay,

lingerie for women of exuberance?

Something imaginative,

like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

In my imagination I create a holster

to pack my twin firearms. My 38-38’s.

A beautiful invention of oiled

Italian leather graced tobacco golden,

whip-stitched, hand-tooled

with Western roses and winged scrolls,

mother-of-pearl snaps

and nipples capped with silver aureoles.

And you, my mother,

gazing from your chaparrita height,

who has cursed and blessed

me with your DNA like so many

Mexican women with a pillar for a torso

like Coatlicue.

Magas, brujas, chingonas.

Rage, rage. Do not go into that good night

wearing sensible white or beige.

Washing My Rebozo by Hand

I wash my silk rebozo in the shower

against my naked skin

to keep the fringe from knotting.

Fuchsia cloth draped over my shoulder,

one Amazon breast exposed.

Even folded in half, the shawl

is longer than I am tall,

fringe work grazing the floor.

For an instant, the water

spills out hot as August

when I turn on the tap,

and I regret my reckless idea

to wash the cloth myself.

Bougainvillea darkens to cranberry,

but, thankfully, the color doesn’t run.

Fibers slick as corn silk when rinsed.

The wet rebozo conforms to my skin

like dough draped over my empanada belly,

eggplant breasts, Coatlicue ass.

I admire myself in the mirror.

Some ancient memory approves.

And I think of that fool William Frawley,

of I Love Lucy, who said of co-star Vivian Vance,

“She has a body like a sack of doorknobs.”

At fifty-six

my Buddha body

bows to gravity.

A life lived.

I am not a sack of doorknobs.

At these heights,

I like myself enough to pose

in this poem just as I am,

solid as Teotihuacán.

A woman of an age

she doesn’t give a damn

what’s said

by a sack of pitos

posing as a man.

Having Recently Escaped from the Maws of a Deathly Life, I Am Ready to Begin the Year Anew