Maude Meehan

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From No Masks.

Denise Levertov

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From No Masks.

Adrie Kusserow

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From The Sun, Nov. 09.

From now on I'll try to tell you where the poem comes from.

Peter McWilliams

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Jody Gladding

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Danusha Laméris

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Kay Ryan

Dorothea Grossman

1.

If we lived on a mountaintop,
the fog would rise up every night,
so thick you could run a comb through it.
Every morning would look like a barbershop,
with wet floors full of leftover curls.

18.

Ten p.m.:
A sky worth waiting for.
Clouds hopping over each other
like sheep.
Before the wind picked up the pace,
when the city lights were young,
I thought to smother you with poems
from this blue
and white
and blue again
meadow.

Jewel

Can you imagine
how silent
a plane crash would be
if you were deaf?

How unbearably loud a rape?

Erica Jong

The Commandments

You don’t really want to be a poet. First of all, if you’re a woman, you have to be three times as good as any of the men. Secondly, you have to fuck everyone. And thirdly, you have to be dead. – Mark Strand

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should sleep near the moon with her face open;
she should walk through herself studying the landscape;
she should not write her poems in menstrual blood.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should run backwards circling the volcano;
she should feel for the movement along her faults;
she should not get a Ph.D. in seismography.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should not sleep with uncircumcised manuscripts;
she should not write odes to her abortions;
she should not make stew of old unicorn meat.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should read French cookbooks and Chinese vegetables;
she should suck on French poets to freshen her breath;
she should not masturbate in writing seminars.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should peel back the hair from her eyeballs;
she should listen to the breathing of sleeping men;
she should listen to the spaces between that breathing.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should not write her poems with a dildo;
she should pray that her daughters are women;
she should forgive her father for his bravest sperm.