Three months into Nothing To Do,
I asked if he wanted my mail route: You
drive, I said, I'll clean some houses,
shake the mothballs off my waitress gear – easier
to slip me in some little space, a mouse
through a hole in the wall, than you.
I was being cheerful,
I wanted to save his battered face,
but he shouted No!

That was the only time
I ever thought he was going to hit me, this husband of mine, and, do you know,
I can't think why. Which of us
was he hurt for? Both of us desperate, but differently,
was it offering women's work – as if men don't
deliver the mail – or my work, my gift
of something he didn't want to need
but needed,
that shamed him so?

This poem appears in CORA FRY'S PILLOW BOOK (FSG publisher)

The Nigerian women smeared
a thick line of Texaco's oil
under each eye, warrior warnings,
then crouched low and sprang
with the boulders of their bodies
their stout ashy legs and mad wrists,
holding their paper banners with words
scratched out and respelled:
Give work to our husbands,
our brothers, our sons.
Give us light and water,
or pack now.
The pure singular force
of themselves.
Their glorious damnable throats.
You remember. Pack now.
Remember.

This poem appears in TEAHOUSE OF THE ALMIGHTY (paperback edition (2006) from Coffee House Press)

This pleasant dental hygienist with her fingers
in my mouth asks So do you have any
children? and I want to tell her that her
elbows rising on either side of my head
look like griffin wings, for some strange
reason, those mythical creatures with a duty
to protect what's priceless, along with the power
to transport me back to that gynecologist's office
thirty years ago, the fifth I'd consulted, his pink
consent form asking Does your husband agree
to your sterilization? and to the signature I'd forged
on the paperwork just as I had as a girl of fourteen
in need of parental permission to watch a sex-ed film
that promised all the answers to whatever
marvels and misconceptions men keep hidden
in their pants pockets, but never delivered
before the parade of friend after friend came rolling
through, handing me their babies to cradle, hopeful
that one perfect embrace could induce
in me the birth of want and the opening of a door
to my mother, whose grandchild balloon
I'd popped one afternoon, her face sick, her hands
extending a new white terrycloth robe
that said if total disarmament was out
of the question, at least we could call a cease-fire
over my belly that would never carry more than a couple
of stitches through my umbilicus, and all those predictions
of regret, inaccurate as Portland forecasts that fail
to include one of our fifty-seven varieties
of rain. But it's impolite to talk with your mouth
full. I shake my head from side to side instead,
her sympathetic fingers still in the dark.

He had her height beat
by a strong foot, and her weight
by double, and made no bones: no girl
belonged in construction unless prone.

One day, on the lift, the two chanced
to be enclosed alone. His rough hand reached
into her shirt's chest pocket, grabbed

a pencil, snapped it in her face.

She locked eye contact, gave an oooh-ooh-
you-broke-my-pencil shrug,

until she could exit at her floor, gasp air.
She knew he'd meant: Any time I want,
I could snap your neck.

She traversed a daily tightrope of bravado
and bluff, became master decoder of gesture
and phrasing, her ear attuned
to the slightest innuendo
at the faintest decibel

until nerves wore threadbare;

until, like an experienced bridge builder ––
on a day that seemed no different ––

out far on a beam: she froze.