DAUGHTERS, 1900
By Marilyn Nelson
Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch,
are bickering. The eldest has come home
with new truths she can hardly wait to teach.
She lectures them: the younger daughters search
the sky, elbow each others’ ribs, and groan.
Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch
and blue-sprigged dresses, like a stand of birch
saplings whose leaves are going yellow-brown
with new truths. They can hardly wait to teach,
themselves, to be called “Ma’am,” to march
high-heeled across the hanging bridge to town.
Five daughters. In the slant light on the porch
Pomp lowers his paper for a while, to watch
the beauties he’s begotten with his Ann:
these new truths they can hardly wait to teach.
The eldest sniffs, “A lady doesn’t scratch.”
The third snorts back, “Knock, knock: nobody home.”
The fourth concedes, “Well, maybe not in church…”
Five daughters in the slant light on the porch.
Marilyn Nelson, the former Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut and professor emerita at the state university there, has been a finalist for the National Book Award on several occasions and honored widely throughout her career. She is founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony.
THE MAD SISTERS
By Patricia Kirkpatrick
The mad sisters were real. We made them up
to save ourselves.
The grassy working of the world,
the drooping cane, the soughing elm—
at night our mother
called us in too soon.
We got mad and ran
to our room. We slammed the door.
We took the knob off.
All that was left was a hole
you could see through.
No one could reach us
and what we looked out to
was surrounded by blankness
We were safe then, sisters flinging
rage and laughter to the floor
like aces in a card game.
Outside a cat caterwauled.
If we couldn’t have cake,
if a woman got thrown down the stairs,
if a father poured Scotch in a Dixie cup,
then came after us,
what did it matter to
The Mad Sisters?
We stayed like that, perfect among ourselves
until one of us got hungry
and wanted out.
Patricia Kirkpatrick, a native Iowan who teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, won the 2006 McKnight poetry fellowship. This poem was published in The Threepenny Review in 2000. In addition to her own poetry, Kirkpatrick has published a Voices in Poetry series, including a volume on Maya Angelou.
TWIN SISTER
By Carol Dine
Husbands, two doctors dying.
The sisters feed them
sucrose with eye drops like birds.
My father dies first;
my uncle follows, predictably.
Men blustery on the outside,
all talk and muscle. But when the skin
& bones go, like a match to newspaper,
nothing’s left.
My mother and her twin
were groomed to be widows.
The hair of one sister is bleached
blonde; the hair of her sister is auburn.
One shrill voice drowns out the other.
When they cut into Elinor’s breast,
miles away Estelle wakes up
and feels the burning.
The twins knew they’d end up like this:
alone in Florida on the patio
listening to the wind howling
down its own tunnel,
not able to tell each other
apart.
Carol Dine teaches at Suffolk University in Boston, and has been poet-in-residence at various writers’ colonies, including MacDowell and Yaddo. She is breast-cancer survivor who also writes and lectures on that subject. This poem is from The Women’s Review of Books in 1991.
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