Tuesday Poetry

All Those Inuit Names for Snow
by Tom Tempkin

My mother is watching her mother die.
Gravity has declared war against the lower lip.
Salt has worn to fine gauze the threads

sprouting from the inner ear. For each one
that goes, we must learn a new word
for what we think life is, what we dream

it will be. Among our tricks and screams
and flowered boudoirs, we must all wear once
the wedding gown stained with mother's blood

or dance the implicit waltz while meandering
to victory with a swollen hand.
I will feed the cat when you're gone.

This is my promise.
The first one to wake whispers to the other:
poinsetta, aspen, sweet fig, dream of orchid, rose.

Why Arming Women Won't Stop Violence Against Women

So here's our heroine's choices. She can shoot him and get convicted of a variety of crimes, because you can't just go around shooting guys. The only guys you can shoot are burglars and guys who Don't Look Like Us. So she goes to jail. Then what do the rest of us do? She becomes like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith---the real life version of all those Evil Disney Mothers, while real life male scumbags get tossed into the collective dustbin of consciousness. We can't think ill of those that rule us. We can't look too closely at how they do it.

So tell me how giving women guns without changing the culture will do any damned good at all. It won't protect women, and chances are it will enrage the men who laugh at the idea that a woman has a right to enjoy her body while he does not. I have to say, too, a stray thought occurred to me. Guys who think they have such rights to women's bodies---what do you suppose their attitude is toward other methods of controlling those women's bodies? Do you really think you have to right to do anything with your body if they don't get off on it? Do you think they care about your body except if it gets them off? Do you really think they give a shit at all?

Giving women guns is just going to put more women behind bars. The very men who proclaim that this will solve the problem are removing themselves and their buddies from the responsible party list by suggesting it. "Hey," they whine, "We gave you an option, you chose not to take it. Not our problem any longer."