Do you know what a poem is, Esther?” “No, what?” I said. “A piece of dust.
I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness. I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack. I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I want was infinite security. I want change and excitement and shoot off in all directions by myself.
I went there to see him instead of to Yale and it was there I found out how he had fooled me all those years and what a hypocrite he was. I found out on the day we saw the baby born.
Betsy started to tell about the male and female corn in Kansas. She got so excited about that damn corn even the producer had tears in his eyes, only he couldn’t use any of it, unfortunately, he said.
Buddy said he figured there must be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each time we met I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it.
Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
She’s the sunflower of the Sunflower State.
I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn’t shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed a ton more weight to make me sleep.
I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicious I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer.
Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.
It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. The box is only temporary.
What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?’... ‘Tenderness.
What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.
If i never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.
But, to salve my conscience, I must feel the pain of work.
I didn’t really see why people should look at me.
She had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell.
Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?