Jendi Reiter
Gender is imaginary, but like Scarlett O'Hara, more real than our neighbor.
Gender is performance. Autobiography is cross-dressing.
Gender is form. The sonnet would like to try on the pants of the epic. But then it would not be talking about love.
Gender is where one starts from. Not home. (Eliot was a man.)
Gender is more than one difference, therefore art is still possible.
Wolf Whistles
We're all trying not to think about sex or cake.
That bitter word hurled from a car.
A moment ago you felt pretty.
Trying not to hammer the nail
into anything but the board.
Hard hat men sucking on coffee,
women with their hands down their throats
like a magician pulling a ten-foot rope out of a bottle.
It seems to go on forever,
monotonous intestine.
We're trying cold baths and grapefruits,
another route around the tar
someone's grateful to be laying down.
Saying throw me in the briar patch,
come on, do.
What a great distraction brambles are.
Rubbing and rubbing the saw against the wood.
What wound is he favoring
as his whistle strips you like paint?
We're smashing pies into our faces,
we're cutting open our skins. The better to eat.
Dugan's Shift
After hours at the plastic vagina factory
Alan recites his poems to rows of tables
stacked with boxes of doctors' models ready
for shipping to Duluth, Tacoma or Parsippany.
Their sounds are lost on the steel shelves of the night.
He pictures pink mouths opening, swallowing learned fingers
during a demonstration of plastic childbirth
or contraception, or melting in plastic joy
at being misdelivered to a dildo warehouse.
(Across town, might he have a counterpart,
arms muscled from stacking
pallets of identical lusts,
who also dreams of painting a window out of this body?)
But more often now the 'girls' are just products
to be shifted, like bricks or the hands
of the clock he wills to move,
always too fast or too slow.
The perfect meter, unreachable.
Wouldn't this have been his teen dream heaven,
shelves of snatch, offering themselves without mockery?
How dull their multiplicity's become, how alien
as words repeated into silence till their meaning unmoors.
Alan, I'm Alan, he reminds the boxes
as if introducing himself after drunkenness
to the girl, some morning stranger,
who's risen like mist from his bed.
Note: When he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his first book 'Poems' in 1962, American poet Alan Dugan (1923-2003) was working in a factory that made plastic vaginas for doctors to demonstrate diaphragm insertion.
"Dugan's Shift" first published in Alligator Juniper (2006).
"Wolf Whistles" first published in Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009).
Jendi Reiter's first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and is available from Amsterdam Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications. She is the editor of Poetry Contest Insider, an online guide to over 750 literary contests, published by www.winningwriters.com. Visit her blog at www.jendireiter.com .