Ruth Nolan
The gender construct, like all other social innovations that add a routine bent to life roles and assignations, provides a continual thread of poetic fascination and exploration in many of my poems. My poetry explores the topic of “gender” from the life-stages of puberty, adolescence, and adulthood, and remains, in my poetry, an evasive form all its own, shifting from free verse to formalism to erotic and suprising juxtapositions that take on a life of their own.
Friendly Fire
The attic door opened easily
that pearl smooth August night
after a day hitchhiking in dusty wind,
no real labor, no hard breathing.
One push, we climbed on the roof,
two sunburned, runaway teenaged girls,
a backpack full of cheese and fruit
stolen from the market that day
snuggled between us, our offspring.
We'd broken into a desert cabin.
I shot a window with my father's gun.
No one had been there for so long
the refrigerator was propped open.
You worried there might be
a dead baby or rattlesnake inside.
I found an unopened bottle of wine.
I held the buck knife, and you held
the fruit. I sliced the salami,
licked my sticky fingers. We joked
about the guys we shared, about
sifting through your mother's
stolen box of jewels. You clasped
a silver necklace on my burnt neck
and I slipped an old ring onto you.
We shared an old wool army blanket
and a man's extra-large flannel shirt,
talked about the guys we shared,
cock and breast size, abortion cramps.
You wanted to know what it was like
to fight fires; I told you I had no sisters.
I popped the cork, you passed the bottle,
I thought I could taste your tongue,
delivered like the silent rise of moon,
punctuating spaces between stars,
I watched Venus, Orion’s Belt fade
while you spread oysters onto rye.
Maturity Class
How many times have you had sex?
asks my daughter in the bathroom.
She guesses four or five, maybe six.
Then she asks,
How do you know
if a man is going to rape you?
I still tuck her in at night with her Barbies.
She's afraid of spiders crawling in her bed,
the random thumps on the wall made
by the man next door and his girlfriend.
I know she's been digging through my Kotex pads,
perhaps imagining them to be pillows for her dolls,
the tampons a sort of emergency candle
equipped with an extra long wick.
In the morning, I notice a few grass blades of hair
Poking out from under her arms, freshly watered.
She tells me that she wants to start wearing a bra.
Her fingers are clumsy yet with the wear of crayons,
and so I must fasten the wayward hook,
wondering what exactly it is that I am holding back,
or training to stay in place.
And after school, she brings her 5th grade Maturity Book
home, opens it to the chapter about the penis.
This is my homework tonight, she giggles.
She asks me to read it to her,
this new kind of bedtime story.
Home Girl
The doctor yanked her from my womb
and turned her belly up to the light
that July night when thunderheads pillared
towards the glare of full moon
and flash flood warnings
were on the nurse's tongues.
Because I have always inhabited deserts
I was not sure I could teach her how to swim.
Now, she is 11 years old, just beginning
to sprout little breasts that resemble
dorsal fins, this daughter who I admit
I had picked out boys’ names for, I wear
jeans and t-shirts, still wishing it were so.
Each day, she asks me to hook the training bra
behind her back. She's a cool girl,
beautifying herself with beaded jewels,
skimpy skirts, platform shoes, green lip gloss
borrowed from God only knows who.
I have long since forgiven her
for the scar slashed across my lower gut,
the stingy kisses slurped across my cheek
the way fat mouthed fish gasp
for bugs hovering at the surface.
And each day, when she goes to school,
I sneak into her bedroom,
find the jars of teddy bear bottled nail polish
and with a surgeon's knife tip finesse
paint my own finger and toenails blue.
Ruth Nolan is a poet/writer/editor based in Palm Desert, CA, where she is Associate Professor of English at College of the Desert. Her poetry has appeared in Pacific Review, Mosaic, Women’s Studies Quarterly, San Diego Poetry Annual, Poemeleon, Phantom Seed, and many other literary magazines and anthologies. She is editor of the anthology No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts, forthcoming from Heyday Books in late 2009. She was the recipient of a 2008-09 Joshua Tree National Park writer’s residency, and has published two collections of poetry, Dry Waterfall (2008) and Wild Wash Road (1996.) She blogs about life in the California desert at http://ruthnolan.blogspot.com.