In a direful way, reaching forth
In a wave of wanting, like a woman
Is supposed to want babies and a home
And a man, to want to attract anything
And anyone better than her as a lifetime
Of being a mere child, a poor thing, a lesser
Than to be silenced and chit-chitted away
To a moon launch of pillows on a bed
Somewhere in a shared cell of misery,
Is the female of the species only a vision
To want
To attract, a steadfast of do or don’t
A lifetime based on one I do?
A have and a have-not no matter what?
The only gender to instantly transform
In three phases only: child, mother, invisible.
Are women meant to be zany volcanoes
That explode upon command until they
Are invisible? The crate, the bath, the vast
Picture of auspicious dexterity known
To man only as the next best thing.
You Swung Round
Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon Poetry). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, The Corporation of Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation. She’s led poetry workshops at Keystone College, Nimrod Writers Conference, The Muse in Norfolk, Virginia, and University of Texas, Austin. Her non-fiction can be found in The Writers Chronicle, Poets Quarterly, and the Portuguese American Journal. Recent readings at Brown University, Rutgers, UMass Dartmouth, Rhode Island College and the Carr Reading Series at the University of Illinois. Recent work appears in The Journal, Laurel Review, Mantis and Quiddity.
perspective…I hope more men read this because their the ones that should