Anne Boyer

Three Poems:

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Mom’s Undiminished Lamb Jacket

Everything Nice Has a Crafted Satin Finish

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

I’m an ardent feminist and often get in arguments.
I am spreading antibacterial Purell all over my keyboard

and throwing the plant, a little piece of apple,
toenail clippers and everything at the drive-thru window.

Lilith, who was the world’s first feminist, thought
I am doing the best I can.

That’s not a feminist primer. Try barefoot kids running goats
and sheep over rocky pastures invading your facial orifices.

A lot of people would probably not understand how a staunch feminist
could justify participants and many spectators dousing one another’s

glorious gaping anus baseballs with colored water in the mall
& a lot of people lacking only a clown with a flower and a bear on a tricycle

would not believe in a woman old enough to be retired
expressing milk out her eyelids.

But feminism is a righteous gift.

Being a student of écriture féminine
is much more specific than being the “Vagina Lady”

Women have the god-given ability to be as boy teen titans
or un-analyzable gilt casino ballooner haven treats.

The Great Cosmic Mother turns around.
Her hair looks like taco meat
and the truck stops

and everybody gets like a-when I get my mind is going
thats nmaybe vagina hunuhhh

I was thinking about it,
and then I remembered I was squirting glue on Jesus.

I blame the Matriarchy, mmm mmm mmmm.
Just lie to me and say it’s all right.


Mom’s Undiminished Lamb Jacket

1.

My pseudonymous Wednesday Womyn’s Group
probe the visceral temple with feminist revisions of Eskimo myths
to pass on the stereotype of vaginal representations in Jaws.

Some of them wear self-reassuring t-shirts that say
“The Great Vagina in the Sky” or “Heavenly Mother’s Vagina,”
but not “The Pookie” or “Empirical Reliance.”

I felt inside me a vocation not visible in that discourse.

Then the knife pierced my warm wet softness in detail
and also I learned from my father that vaginas
cover up all the mirrors in a home.

2.

The semen swim up Mom’s tubes and cluster around the ovum.
Here only one sperm enters a city with a virile Orthodox community.
The less sexy side is, on the contrary, the experience of Sri Lanka.

When we were isolated it was very easy for other people
to make us feel we were just moving from pregnancy to pitiable
lurchers losing part of my daughter’s story to the city.

My aunt would enthusiastically proclaim
“Set the tea bags on fire!” and Prima Rufina would tell me
the act of ass-to-mouth simply shows the actress accepts her own body.

It was a piece of information to me,
coming down on the side of foreign intervention.
Then the moment of rage comes so hard upon hot young mothers in their 30s

carefully chosen to elicit feelings of negativity
when feminist theology is experience-oriented.

3.

Mom had on an undiminished lamb jacket
so I wanted to post pictures
of a Feminist/Scientist/Filipina/Subaru
but what I was feeling was fear — and panic —
and a BMW, and a small but visible part
of the Harvard scene.

The “elastic,” or “orgasmatron’s mom” vagina
is passive, waiting to be filled with experience

or a penis
or an order to control what is cute
or what everyone attests is the Naked Fire Goddess herself
who happens to be a model.


Everything Nice Has a Crafted Satin Finish

Irony (he means sarcasm) is a terrible companion on Valentine’s Day,
so I tried to make an artificial vagina out of stuff in the refrigerator.

Soft feminine shoulders, long, thin arms with graceful hands:
it brought to mind the down of a swan or the wing of a dove.

If I were a nightingale I would vomit like a nightingale.
Love, transfiguration, having sex in the form of a goose,

bonobos engaging in highly promiscuous mutual masturbation—
that is a fantastic nightlife.

But when you are young and you pretty yourself up
everything up in Alcatraz means getting your ass fucked.

The myth of Leda does not make a huge amount of sense
to girls found lying unconscious covered in their own spit.

Thin vomit comes out, the color of tea.
These changes are seen in Sylvia Plath’s vagina.

As opposed to “jish,” the word she said she would use for pussy
if we had salient evidence supporting the theory was “transgression,”

but the alcohol from novelty thermometer earrings may result in death.
Let swine squelch in the slough

and let only surrealism, Texas, and Rick James matter:
that seems a valid constraint in this post-avant / avant-post world.