By Rita Randazzo
Date: 18 July 1999

Things That Occurred to Me Last Week When I Should Have Been Working

Loving the wrong man 
is like trying to buy strawberries 
in the hardware store.

Where do you buy the right man?

Resurrecting itself like spring
from the ashes of a winter you would swear
was the end,
through a hot, sexy summer
to melancholy autumn, 
love for the very only
rises and falls
and rises again.

But we're used to the rhythms of the earth.

From 12 to 50
a woman's life 
is bounded by blood.

An inescapable river.
An inevitable war.
Because kisses would die on my lips 
without my enemy to receive them.

Even writing this poem is an act of subversion
to the order of things, 
swimming the bloody river
when I should have been working.