A woman reminisces about and with a child she chose not to have. It would have been born in winter, in a time of financial hardship, perhaps to have been given up for adoption. Sorrow for the child that never was causes the woman to swear devotion to her living children, yet she does not seem to regret her decision.
This poem builds by repetition to a climax: "if there is a river /more beautiful than this," if there is a river more faithful, braver, more ancient, more powerful. Each repetition begins a new stanza, a stronger stanza, ending finally in a prayer that, if there is such a river, it should flow "through animals / beautiful and faithful and ancient / and female and brave." (24 lines)
The speaker was treated for cancer but afterwards "the kidneys / refused to continue. / they closed their thousand eyes." Now she is in the dialysis unit, a patient once again, with other patients. She thinks her body rebelled against the cancer surgery by refusing to lose "even the poisons" that the kidney eliminates.
She thought that when the cancer was treated she would be well, but instead, there was more illness--a chronic disease. She knows that she is expected to take the situation in stride ("we are not / supposed to hate the universe") but she is "furious"--all her gratitude for being saved from cancer has been nullified.
The speaker appears to be in need of an organ transplant (see dialysis, annotated in this database). Her son is the likely donor but there is an incredible irony in this: 30 years earlier she had tried to abort him, brutally ("the hangers I shoved inside"), before abortion was legal. Now, as she is told that her body might reject his, she remembers how she had previously rejected his body, and how he had refused to be rejected ("refusing my refusal").
This short poem contrasts perspectives of the places where two different societal groups live. What the larger (white) society considers the inner city is what the poet and her people call "home." At the same time the inner city view of "uptown" is of a lifeless place that has no particular appeal. The poet would rather stay where she is, in this "no place" and "be alive."
these hips are big hips says the woman narrator, as she begins a 15 line celebration of her body and its power. With rhythmic progression, the poem evokes the forward movement of swaying hips--hips that "have never been enslaved", that are "mighty" and "magic" and can "put a spell on a man . . . . "
Miss Rosie is homeless, a street person surrounded by her foul-smelling possessions. She is not a stranger to the narrator, who has thought long and hard about her present circumstances and how she might have been long ago before she became a familiar sight in the neighborhood. Now reduced to rags, this "wet brown bag of a woman," says the narrator, once was "the best looking gal in Georgia." The narrator "stand[s] up" for her through her "destruction."
The narrator observes an old, poor woman "who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia." now in a state of advanced deterioration. The poem expresses the poignancy of watching a decayed life from the perspective of memory; it ends with an affirmation of human dignity.
A sharp poem, directed to the sons of men. The poet wishes them periods, cramps, clots, and hot flashes. She wishes them the difficulties and embarrassments of the female gender. Mostly, she wishes that they experience the arrogance of gynecologists, "not unlike themselves."
