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      April 15, 2016Ann ClarkMy Mother Comes Home Crying from GE

      My father, who works swing shift
      and makes Campbell’s Tomato Soup
      and grilled cheese for me every day
      when I get home from kindergarten,
      asks what’s wrong hon, what’s wrong,
      why are you back early, are you sick,
      but she is still going oh, oh, oh, out
      loud like me or my brother when we cry,
      as if she has skinned her knees,
      and I sit at the white and silver
      kitchen table and swing my legs
      and wait for soup, and she says
      he took my idea, he took it and said
      it was his after he promised to present
      it to engineering, he didn’t give me credit;
      they gave him a thousand shares
      in the company and when I told him
      he stole my idea, he just smiled
      and said sure I did, how are you
      going to prove it you little, oh, oh,
      and her knees are hurt again so
      she can’t say the words, and smoke
      is choking the kitchen because
      my grilled cheese is burned
      so I know my soup will have
      a thick, dark skin like a scab.

      from #51 - Spring 2016

      Ann Clark

      “At 52, I’m astonished that many young women assume the battle for equal rights is over and has been won. The disinterest in the erosion of women’s right to choose angers and terrifies me, and as an English professor, I see young people persisting in anti-feminist attitudes not because of ill-will but because of socialization through mass media. Bright men and women will claim, ‘Everyone knows that women are naturally more nurturing’ (more emotional, less logical, worse at math, bad drivers, indecisive, less intelligent), and as long as these myths deprive women socially and economically, I will be a feminist and a feminist poet. I write about women’s lives, their work, their losses, their victories. Because I was born and raised in the working class and in an extremely rural area, my writing reflects women’s ties to the land. I value history and artifact and try to hear and see those women who worked and died here as people, not victims.”

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