by Marge Piercy
in the mirror. The poor have been
discarded already into the oblivion
pail of not to be spoken words.
They are as lepers were treated once,
to be shipped off to fortified islands
of the mind to rot quietly. If
poverty is a disease, quarantine
its victims. If it’s a social problem
imprison them behind high walls.
Maybe it’s genetic: how often they
catch easily preventable diseases.
Feed them fast garbage and they’ll
die before their care can cost you,
of heart attacks, stroke. Provide
cheap guns and they’ll kill each
other well out of your sight.
Ghettos are such dangerous places.
Give them schools that teach
them how stupid they are. But
always pretend they don’t exist
because they don’t buy enough,
spend enough, give you bribes
or contributions. No ads target
their feeble credit. They are not
real people like corporations.
Don’t send dead flowers
There is your mother, your son, your friend
with their insides sucked out, organs
in the sewage, that primped body
filled with carcinogenic chemicals
painted, pinned, presented for your
enjoyment like plastic fruit in a bowl.
Everybody is supposed to coo,
simper, doesn’t she look as if
she’s sleeping. But she’s stone dead
and half of her gone missing now.
An organ oozes lugubrious sound.
Dead flowers surround the corpse.
I want to go into the earth quickly,
quietly and give my minerals back.
I want to become the living soil,
home of beetles and yes, worms.
Let my flesh feed and my bones
fertilize. Gone not to dust but dirt,
the mother of us all. Coffins
like limousines, like Mercedes
expensive and shiny for the left-
overs of a person, pretending
death is a nap and people are
permanent marble monuments.
My flesh tears easily, bruises,
will rot and stink and finally end
sweet as compost, giving itself
to trees, to grass, to wildflowers
and bees and mice, to whatever
wants to grow from my spent life.
A hundred years since the Triangle Fire
On March 25, 1911, a fire spread through the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The mostly immigrant workers, young Italian, Jewish, and German women who sewed shirtwaists, or women’s blouses, were trapped behind locked doors. The death toll was 146, and many women, their clothing and hair burning, threw themselves from the windows to their deaths on the pavement far below, while spectators watched and could not help. Shortly thereafter, twenty thousand women struck for improved working conditions and wages. The factory building is now part of New York University. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire remains the fourth largest industrial disaster in U.S. history.
Bodies falling through the air
when all exits from the fire are closed
to them and flames lick their skin:
we have seen that.
In our time and theirs.
Labor was cheap then;
too often cheap now, sweat
shops, whether crammed into
Brooklyn lofts or shipped
overseas. Women are cheap and
children are cheaper. Doors
locked against their escape.
Growing up in center city
Detroit when the factories
hummed like huge hives
at night and the sky was pink
from steel mills on the river
I learned early how replaceable
we all were to those with
power to replace us.
I see your charred clothes
glued to flesh as you hurtle
toward pavement, my sisters,
hard worked women with
blistered hands, forced to labor
six days, whose rest came
only in histories that can never
rectify what greed ignited.
Ethics for Republicans
An embryo is precious;
a woman is a vessel.
A fertilized egg is a person;
a woman is indentured to it.
An embryo is sacred until birth.
After that, he/she is on their own.
Abortion is murder. Rape,
incest are means to an end:
that precious fertilized egg
housed in an expendable body.
Let us make babies and babies
and babies; children are something
else, probably future criminals,
probably welfare cheats whose
education hikes taxes. You
can freely dispose of them.
Another obituary
We were filled with the strong wine
of mutual struggle, one joined loud
and sonorous voice. We carried
each other along revolting, chanting,
cursing, crafting, making all new.
First Muriel, then Audre and Flo,
now Adrienne. I feel like a lone
pine remnant of virgin forest
when my peers have met the ax
and I weep ashes.
Yes, young voices are stirring now,
the wind is rising, the sea boils
again, yet I feel age sucking
the marrow from my bones,
the loneliness of memory.
Their voices murmur in my inner
ear but never will I hear them
speak new words and no matter
how I cherish what they gave us
I want more, I still want more.
What it means
Unemployed: soon invisible,
after a while, unemployable,
unwanted, with your future
eroding along with confidence,
sense of self, the family
cracking along old fault lines.
And what do you do? Age.
Out of work: out of security,
out of value, out of the routine
that organizes the days, out
of health insurance, out of
the house when the mortgage
can’t be paid, out on the street,
out of society, out of luck.
Your job was shipped
overseas. Your job and two
others are being done now
by one frantic worker.
A robot replaced you.
Your company was bought
and demolished.
Somebody elected you
superfluous, a discard.
Somebody made money;
somebody bought a yacht
with your old salary. Some-
body has written you off,
Somebody is killing you.
At night when you can no
longer sleep, don’t blame your-
self. What could you have
done? Nothing. Choices were
made to fatten dividends,
bloat bonuses, pay for a new
trophy wife and private plane.
You did nothing wrong
except your birth. Wrong
parents. Wrong place. Wrong
race. Wrong sex. If only
you’d had the sense to be
born to the one percent
life would be truffles today.
How have the mighty …
What we have done to you
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for our convenience. In cave
paintings you stand, huge, looming
over hunters with your sharp
deadly horns and prancing hooves.
You could reach seven feet tall
at your massive shoulders.
Called Aurochs, now just cows.
We have tamed the wildness out,
shrunk you to an amenable size.
You were bigger than bison,
fierce, worshipped for your strength
companions of the moon goddess.
In the Greek islands, dove cotes
sacred to her are marked with
your horns. Hathor the cow
goddess gave fertility and joy.
I meet your limpid gaze as you
chew your cud under a scrub oak
then rise lowing to be milked:
turned from monarch to food.
We know
The crickets are loud at night
a chorus of teakettles demanding
sex. The tomato plants begin
to brown from the bottom up.
South of here a hurricane comes
ashore with murder in its hollow
heart, winds little can stand
against, a surge of tide roiling
over seawalls. The lords of oil
know they will survive however
the soil cracks with drought
and cattle and mustangs die
of thirst. No matter how tornadoes
level towns, strewing the precious
of lives across rubble. Hurricanes
move in posses across the weather
map. We who garden feel climate
change in our dirty hands, see
strange new bugs and stampeding
weeds, piles of eggplants and no
peas, fewer butterflies, more horse-
flies. We face the ocean that is way
too warm this time of year and wait
and worry, but we do not pray
to the lords of oil who control
the climate but to whatever god
we offer our hope like the fruits
Cain brought that were rejected.
The passion of a fan
What part of a person is tied up
in the sports team they watch
on TV? I remember the day after
the Patriots lost the Super Bowl
to the Giants, the streets of Wellfleet
were dim with the fog of depression.
Defeat wafted through houses, offices,
stores. It was yellow-grey and tasted
of salt and pollution. In Byzantium
supporters of green or blue chariot
racing teams killed each other
till the streets ran crimson.
We not only root for our teams
but see wars as giant hockey
games. Our team’s basketball
forward is dearer than a neighbor
or cousin or co-worker. He
is our darling, our avatar.
Somehow we seek to become him.
We wear his number. We
imagine he would love us
back. But we don’t exist.
We’re just noise in the stadium,
so many numbered ticket holders,
sad faces, autograph seekers
a maw into which that player’s
talent is leeched until glory
days are over and he retires
to fail at a restaurant and die
at fifty-eight of an enlarged heart.
In pieces
Governments, TV newsmen count soldiers
dead, wounded—mostly the dead, never
the brain dead or the damaged in what
passes for life, the suicides, the trained
killers who can’t stop loading their anger.
But mostly that’s not who dies from
a drone attacking a suspicious crowd
that is really a market. Just caught
in crossfire. The wrong place [their
little house] wrong time [family meal].
A school is poisoned, a wedding
party is strafed, a hospital is blown
up. Babies are collateral damage.
A pregnant woman may be hiding
a bomb in her maternity clothes.
The dogs, the cats, the birds tame
and wild, the cattle, goats, lizards,
hares, foxes, all the creatures who
live in what has become a battlefield
and have no way to safety: they die.
Trees perish; whole forests, whole
ecosystems are bombed out of
existence. Creeks poisoned. Soil
honeycombed with mines. Farms
vanished. Ways of living destroyed.
After armies have gone back home
where taxes still pay for that war,
how many decades will pass until
the land is green and fertile again,
people do not scream in their sleep
if they dare to sleep, children play
in fields without losing a leg or head,
birds sing celebrating their nests,
neighbors forgive desperate choices
and a thing ripped is finally knit whole.
Ghosts
How often we navigate by what is no
longer there. Turn right where the post
office used to be. She lives in a condo
above where the bakery blew sweet
yeasty smells into the street. A nail
salon now.
Kelsey Hayes had a factory there
on Livernois where our neighbors
worked. A foundry spat out metal
where the strip club spits neon
now and loud skanky music
into the night.
Rows of little cheap houses replaced
by a few McMansions. Where did
all those people go? The workers
in factories, in tool and die shops,
the shoemakers and tailors, mom
and pop eateries?
You can be plunked down in Anywhere
U.S.A. and see the same row of stores
Target, Walmart, Gap, Toys-R-Us.
Exit the superhighway: McDonald’s,
Taco Bell, Burger King, Hardees,
you haven’t moved.
That’s where the school was: see,
it’s condos now. That’s the church
the parish closed to pay for priests’
sex. China got the shoe factory.
Urban renewal turned the old neighbor-
hood to dust.
Some things we make better and some
are destroyed by greed and bad
politics. We live in the wake
of decisions we didn’t share in,
survivors of a vast lethal typhoon
of power.
One of the expendables
Cape Cod is wed to the mainland
by two bridges, on mild week
ends and all summer fed
by miles of backed up cars.
Right across Massachusetts
Bay, one of the worst nuclear
power plants, clone of Fukushima
leaks into the bay. On its roof
three thousand spent rods.
Vulnerable to hurricane, flooding,
attack from the air or land,
it squats menacing us.
We who live here all year, our
hundred thousands of summer
visitors, we have been deemed
expendable since we cannot
by any means be evacuated.
“Shelter in place” means breathe
in, absorb through your skin,
drink, swallow, eat radiation.
Your home will be uninhabitable
should you happen to survive
at least a while b
efore cancer
dissolves your organs. The land
the pure water we cherish
will be tainted for decades. Fish,
birds, your dog and cats, raccoons,
squirrels, coywolves expendable
too. We count for nothing
compared to profits for a utility
housed in New Orleans where
you’d imagine they know floods.
We’re the throwaway people,
not important like corporations.
Chop off the crooked arm
of Cape Cod and let us bleed.
Let’s meet in a restaurant
Is food the enemy?
Giving a dinner party has become
an ordeal. I lie awake the night
before figuring how to produce
a feast that is vegan, gluten free,
macrobiotic, avoiding all acidic
fruit and tomatoes, wine, all nuts,
low carb and still edible.
Are beetles okay for vegans?
Probably not. Forget chocolate
ants or fried grasshoppers.
Now my brains are cooked.
Finally seven o’clock arrives
and I produce the perfect meal.
At each plate for supper, a bowl
of cleanly washed pebbles. Enjoy!