Reader Appreciation Day

I don't tell you often enough how erudite and marvelous you really are. My recent travels in all sorts of comments threads remind me how very lucky I am. And yes, of course you can send me money.


Apropos of nothing, I was reading through the book into which I scribbled as a teenage goddess. It has the usual teenage angst, lots of stuff about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, lots of imagined sex (hee) and some very odd poems about mathematics. Reading it is like meeting someone I once knew but have now forgotten. I have a lot of empathy for her, even when I laugh at some of her pronouncements.

She was a proto-feminist, too. I have translated one poem I wrote at age sixteen for you:

Suddenly
I found myself in the poem I read:

It spoke of women,
of flesh-eating petals
of slack roses dangling
of meals which are eaten with
soft knives at night.

There are no sorrowing women
(it says)
Only a dank smell in old velvet.

And I turned the page
with these bones
which shine through the skin of my wrists

Not with my ovaries
not with my bloody womb
not with my vagina.

These bones are what
they do not lust after.
These bones are irrevocably
Me.