“It comes out the same place it goes in.” Why did no one

tell me this till so late?

The baby came. It was a beautiful baby and strong. Why did

it live only two years? I don’t know what it died of. Some-

times I think it was afraid of our house, something wrong,

and didn’t want to grow up with us.

I found out my husband was trying to get a sixteen year

old girl neighbor. He was telling me, “If you go with other

men I kill you.” I made a date with the family doctor that

week and kept it

We have money from the butcher shop. I took piano lessons.

I know elocution and recite long poems. And all the time I am

hunting more life—nothing satisfies me—what will become

of me?

Glimmer

Let down your braids of hair, lady.

Cross your legs and sit before the looking-glass

And gaze long on lines under your eyes.

Life writes; men dance.

And you know how men pay women.

Jerry

Six years I worked in a knitting mill at a machine

And then I married Jerry, the iceman, for a change.

He weighed 240 pounds, and could hold me,

Who weighed 105 pounds, outward easily with one hand.

He came home drunk and lay on me with the breath of stale beer

Blowing from him and jumbled talk that didn’t mean anything.

I stood it two years and one hot night when I refused him

And he struck his bare fist against my nose so it bled,

I waited till he slept, took a revolver from a bureau drawer,

Placed the end of it to his head and pulled the trigger.

From the stone walls where I am incarcerated for the natural term

Of life, I proclaim I would do it again.

Horses and Men in Rain

Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter’s day, gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window,

And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches—and talk about mail carriers and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.

Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the Holy Grail and men called “knights” riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping the hunks of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.

Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers and write poems of Launcelot, the hero, and Roland, the hero, and all the olden golden men who rode horses in the rain.

Hoodlums

I am a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlums—maybe so.

I hate and kill better men than I am, so do you, so do all of us—maybe—maybe so.

In the ends of my fingers the itch for another man’s neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusk’s cartoons against the sunset.