Poetry refuses to enter my everyday paper.
I wait with my knees under my chin,
my white skirt tucked under my bottom
and I feel like a child waiting for the rain to fill my bowl.
At fifteen I wrote my first poem and was utterly proud of it;
the words came to me regularly like a sixteen-year-old’s menstrual cycle,
stronger as the years went by, curves and bulges
appearing in their right places,
love-filled anthologies of men and lovers,
of summer affairs and sex.
It simply does not listen now, the stubborn woman that she is.
