For Father’s Day (a new poem)

Okay, I admit it. At first I was a little ho-hum about participating in a staged reading of The Vagina Monologues. (Isn’t that, like, a little mid-90s?)

But someone I admire asked me to, and so I said okay. And now, thinking about performing my little bit tomorrow night, along with other Trinity women faculty and administrators, I’m not feeling ho-hum at all. I often tell my students that when you read a poem out loud, you read it with your body. And to read Eve Ensler’s lines has physically reminded me violence against women isn’t a phase. A journalist is attacked on the streets of Cairo, and people talk about how pretty she is, hinting that she should know better than to do her job. An 11-year-old girl is gang-raped in Texas, and the New York Times reports that the boys who did this are going to have to live with it for the rest of the lives. The boys? Meanwhile, our legislature is cutting both sex education, and education period. It’s 2011. Legwarmers are back. Haven’t we learned anything? I’m no actor, but all proceeds benefit the San Antonio Rape Crisis Center.

The Vagina Monologues
Stieren Theater- Trinity University
March 28, 7pm
$5 Students
$7 General Admission
Lungs (1)

While waiting for a man to finish explaining the significance
of the S series for the 2010 models, and how much
faster this difference will carry me
from here to there, I consider
my father’s soft hands
guiding the narrow bronchoscope tube
down a coal miner’s windpipe, then steering
the levee road back from the hospital
where last year’s tornado left
blue tarps practicing
the breath of hold-yourself-empty,
then hold-yourself-full.
I didn’t ask
for a god to chew my food and spit
gently into my mouth.
Mine drove slow, imagining
how he’d trim those trees for better light.