Misandry Poem #1
I am immense
& I am out of control
of my body & I resist
all attempts at containment
(and abatement) by well-
meaning civil engineers.
With a slight effort I could
break down your door
and sometimes I think if
I tried really hard I could
knock out power to a mid-
sized Southern city.
I regret nothing. Not the
cocaine or the window of the
ice cream shop or the fact
that today I wore my cop-
kicking boots so I could kick
in the face of a cop.
I do not lament what I
consumed in my quest to
become all-consuming.
I am not sorry for
eviscerating you on live television
as you announced your campaign for
San Francisco District 8 Supervisor.
And when sometimes I pause to
remember the loneliness of your
soft belly against the vast and
desolate Pacific my thoughts
become lineated in a cloudy way,
but that is easily brushed aside,
like stray Ponderosa pines,
or highway overpasses,
or heartbreak.
for the em dash
if we could do our Reading over again I would say
that your breaths between lines should not be so Obvious
and I should have been friendlier to the Bartender —
the Window-washers perform a ritual. better person,
I say, crawl into your Light Fixture, your metadata are
Revelatory or not //
Diasporic nodules appear on the body of an artist &
it is Prophecy or it is indeed the entire breathing Organism
of Manhattan itself —
The warmth of the needle on Vinyl
no longer a plausible Romance // so I postulate
the Silence alive in your Headphones with the City
all Boot-heels that echo on Sidewalk?
Your metadata depict Me Emily Dickinson
hailing a cab in an outer borough and it is spring or Whatever —
Maxine Anderson is chronically underemployed in New York.