women’s poetry for a change
issue # 59
fall 2003
page seven...
| the awful truth rochelle hope mehr For too long I’ve agonized over what other people think. I used to think it must be part of the insecurity of having an illness no one understands. But now I understand that it’s really a very negative personality trait that I had even before the thyroiditis It’s this push-me-pull-me I have a sense of raising expectations No, they’re just my own expectations What really happens when I encounter other people, the human race? Now, or years ago? Does it matter? Does it matter that I’d have staring contests with therapists because I was trying to figure them out just as much as they were trying to decipher me? That I’d run to bookshops trying to find books that would expatiate on the theories I thought they were using to try to analyze me? I never could understand what they were saying so I figured there must be a method behind the madness and I looked for the method in psychiatric tomes (to no avail) What does that have to do with my misgivings with ordinary mortals? Am I afraid that they too are trying to read things into my demeanor or into every word I utter in casual discourse? Am I being oversensitive? Maybe they just don’t like me. Maybe they never really liked me. In any case, they seem exquisitely uncomfortable in my presence. Maybe it’s not that they’re acting any differently now It’s just that they’re acting the same The world has not changed except for extraordinary circumstances people are largely indifferent to each other’s fate or maybe it’s just that individuals do not count for much I shouldn’t think I am so important But am I totally expendable, am I no better than a computer that is obsolete? It’s funny, when I was a child the other kids used to call me, “Computer” I really like to be treated like a human being. |
a night eleanor koldofsky make me a chair I whispered in her hair and she turned on her side and drew up her knees to please me as I fit on her lap my legs draped over her thighs her articulate fingers trailed designs over my belly as I beheld a mahogany hand on her botticelli shoulder both mine our love so tender and deep we may have thought we were asleep until the blue eyes lifted to me spying the small mischief around my lips waiting for a sound we were muscled silk had loved and wrestled probed tasted tested soft nipples swelling I the full breasted and she the ruby tit tilted thalia her voice was music: “are you hungry” lazily we stood gazing at one another slipping on a shirt the lightest cover and silently drifted on our way down the stairs to the big kitchen heaping food on a tray tiptoed back to our rumpled bed punching pillows spread this different feast between us me and my venus the french pate, crackers crisp, italian olives with a pimento twist, cheese from wisconsin, wine from the usa the perfume rising from between our legs all around us lay at two a m - by three a m we were sort of sated most of our appetites moderately abated we shifted down and as nature intended our bodies soon, once again blended. |
