"I have no name:
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!

The School Children – Louise Gluck

The children go forward with their little satchels.
And all morning the mothers have labored
to gather the late apples, red and gold,
like words of another language.

And on the other shore
Are those who wait behind great desks
To receive these offerings.

How orderly they are – the nails
on which the children hang
their overcoats of blue or yellow wool.

And the teachers shall instruct them in silence
and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out,
drawing to themselves the gray limbs of fruit trees
bearing so little ammunition.

My Tragic Opera by Evelyn Lau

Your home is the house with the leaded windows
gleaming gothic as flames toss in the fireplace.
Your bed is white as the whites of your eyes,
white as egg-whites, in the tomato-walled room
of the kitchen where you stand,
the neck of a bottle of Chivas in your hand.
The eerie blue light of your eyes wavers in the dark
as I make my way towards you holding my ice-laden glass.

Across the street, a line of empty houses on the block,
hooded in the snow that hides flaws in the foundations
and the painted structures. Yet sales remain slow.
Your real estate signs stay stabbed in the ground
like stakes or crosses, as you take me out
onto your newly-built poarch, my thinly-clad feet
sink deep into the punishment of snow.

But to fuck you in your nuptial bed while your wife
and children toss in hammocks in the tropics!
Upstairs, evidence of your daughters everywhere
in Doc Martins, denim and Beverly Hills 90210 pinups.
The eldest has starved herself beyond menstruation,
the middle one is the compulsive liar,
only the youngest remains a virgin in her white party dress.

Watercolours framed from first efforts in kidergarten,
drugstore alarm clocks, rows of pencils with erasers
that smell of peaches and passionfruit -
Don't tell me these things don't belong to me!
I will become bulimic and purge into your daughter's toilet,
sing my tragic opera in the shower with the reflective tiles,
lower my wifely bountiful body into the bath...

Along the Oregon coast an 18-year old prostitute
lurches out of a bar, aims her thumb in the direction
she wants the road to take her, is raped then stabbed
as many times as the years she was old. In extreme cold,
a plastic object will shatter at a single touch.
Tonight the city is crippled by ice, cars mumble
through the side streets, their movements precarious
as those perfect high notes in the opera at the coliseum.
Laughing, I test all your daughters' beds for comfort,
steal their lunch money, destroy their teenage trinkets.