Gun Ghazal
I am a fan of water pistols but an enemy of guns;
Pull out those Super Soakers and put away those big guns.
My boyfriend tried to teach me how to shoot a target:
goggles on, ears plugged, arms extended, I had just begun
my period, and all I could think of was blood, the good kind,
my body busy and alive, slick with its own potential. I let the gun
go slack in my hand. “Is this a deal-breaker?” he asked. It was.
The same boyfriend used to kiss his biceps and call them “guns.”
A Vietnam War protester placed a carnation in a rifle’s barrel.
Once, years before, Mae West ribbed a police officer: “Is that a gun
in your pocket . . .?” My father loved Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke;
when my parents fought, my mother called me their “smoking gun.”
My mother was afraid of her own temper. No pistols for her—
instead, scrubbing floors and pounding meatloaves, then gunning
the gas and leaning on the horn. I’m afraid of my temper, too.
I’m afraid of leading with anger, like feudal lords and shoguns,
so certain they were right. I’d rather punch my pillow than
reach for a weapon. As Chekhov warned, when there’s a gun
in your story, someone has to pull the trigger. That’s why
we love or fear them. Shooting is the only purpose of a gun.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Ghazal
(March 15, 1933 - September 18, 2020)
When RBG wore her silver “dissenting” collar,
she must’ve been hot under the collar.
Would men ever take their feet off her neck,
or just expect she’d rinse the ring around her collar?
Can she still see us now that she’s passed,
through the murky glass ceiling, an opaque pink collar?
A Hollywood movie and documentary memorialize
her courage and landmark cases, why we call her
notorious, buy RBG T-shirts, stickers, and face masks,
why little girls trick-or-treat in her signature lace collar.
VMI, Obergefell v. Hodges, Sessions v. Dimaya:
She met some haters among the hetero white-collars,
like The NY Post who characterized her as Darth Bader,
the cartoonists who drew her in a bulldog’s spiked collar.
But RGB laughed it off, and when Kate McKinnon
played her on SNL, bespectacled and collared,
working out—teabag punching bags, Q-tip barbells—
it might have been the wake-up caller
we ignored. Surely, we thought, she’d live forever:
Now SCOTUS is her cenotaph, a gaping shock collar.
This is Not a Test Ghazal
Voters for Hillary saw in their Rorschach test
an eerie glimmer of standard achievement tests
on which A+ girls scored lower than B- boys.
These capable, full-grown women could attest
to being labeled shrill, cute, bitchy, ballbuster,
their placement tests switched out for purity tests,
screen tests, fill-in-the-blank quizzes, breast exams.
Even a female Secretary of State might be tested
for her knowledge of cookie recipes, judged
as if competing in a Miss Congeniality contest.
Then we studied ourselves—what had we done
to embody yearbook superlatives like Quietest,
Most Likely to Give In, Most Likely Not to Complain.
When did loneliest become a synonym for smartest,
ambitious become a synonym for pushy, loud?
A single factor is always decisive on a litmus test.
Will she laugh at my jokes? Or is she the jokester?
Should she smile pretty at the proctor she detests?
Never ham it up, never wear all your jewels at once.
What happens next is not the end—it’s just the latest.
Truth-or-Dare Ghazal
Now a nation of post-truth and post-D.A.R.E.,
our Prez and his son snort lines of “truth,”
then chase them with hydroxychloroquine cocktails.
They tweet conspiracies, wondering if Americans dare
question their hoodwinks and humdingers. Maybe sobriety is
letting go of what we can’t control. Maybe the truth
was always a tail we chased, but now the whole
kite’s torn, stuck in a tree. Dr. Kildare,
a fictional medical doctor, could find work on TV,
but the Prez stifles real Dr. Fauci. “The truth
will set you free, but first, it will piss you off,”
said Gloria. At the Women’s March she dared
women to put their bodies where their beliefs are
and be shrill, feisty, unafraid to speak the truth;
in a gruesome parody, the Prez now urges
Proud Boys to be shrill, issues a double-dog-dare
to “poll-watchers” and populists everywhere.
Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth,
forerunners of Black Lives Matter, foremothers of
NOW, fought the devils. Let’s be angels who dare.
Meta Ghazal
I always wanted to write a ghazal
once I learned to pronounce it: guzzle.
All week the trees have guzzled rain—
repetitive storms like end words in a ghazal.
An uneasy susurrus accompanies this rain,
the whirlwind of potential Hurricane Gisel.
In sturm und drang, my thirst for beauty grows,
my thirst for repetition—nuzzle, puzzle, ghazal.
Palm fronds in the road, pelicans in the sky—
the opposite of the desert where a gazelle
makes graceful haste across an arid plain.
Agha Shahid Ali introduced me to the ghazal:
“he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.”
More recently, Marilyn Hacker writes political ghazals,
probes how we each contribute to “the dark times.”
Some of us bite our fingernails; some guzzle
beer, climb trees, feed birds, or play the lottery.
Others rewrite scary fairy tales—Hansel and Ghazal,
Rumplesonnet, Cindervillanelle. Our poem-thirst
to make sense of the world—a sip, then a ghazal.
