I share my mother’s cuticles, her calloused hands and round knuckles that crack every morning like chimes on a clock. I carry my mother’s ankles around under the cuffs of my jeans; I lug the weight of her full-bodied torso, stuffed with arteries and bones and vessels filled with blood to keep the whole thing running. I have my mother’s varicose veins, her webbed wrinkles, the lines on her cheeks. I bear the bumpy skin at the base of her wrist where a sweater rubbed its wiry w

the night nurses chain-smoke outside of cape cod hospital, drink their coffee from styrofoam dixie cups, and pick lint off their pastel scrubs during break. they live cross-legged on the stone wall by the emergency exit, killing kindling cigarette butts in a communal ashtray. inside we are wired, wilting as the hours pass. an old tv keeps the room alive in young hours, keeps the young busy in tangled wires, hooked up with ativan prescriptions and oxygen levels, keeps my head

The rope was knotted when I found it. White and worn, tense from the front to back with knots stretching as long as 5 feet and 11 inches. I irked to untangle these knots, biting my nails loosened the ability to free the rope. One unraveled, several produced. Should have paid attention to the other hands tying the knots. I invite others to help, get to know their entanglements. One’s a pretzel knot, my father swallows it. A butterfly knot, grandfather slits the w

Are you the color of Congress, the Senate, and the tacky walls of the Oval Office? Do you speak the right language, is it with the right accent? And if not can we use your brain or your labor to make our weapons? Would you vote for the correct person? Were your ancestors brought or did they come? Or have they been here all along? Are you a Red, a commie who’s more of a socialist, a bleeding heart liberal willing to pay two bucks more for a McDonald’s burger if it means the pe

Mother told me, her roundness as the Earth, “You should watch your weight.” #2018 #IrisEMcPherson #poetry

The all new redesigned Venus razor will give you the smoothest shave you’ll ever get and sits in the endless repertoire of beauty that’s expected to be performed. It is among the youngest of its kind, only there for a hundred of the thousands of years that we have bled on this Earth. Think of Boudicca’s armpits and laugh. See Joan of Arc’s hairy legs burning and be silent. Dream of Cleopatra’s curling pubic hair and tremble. They made us want to be as we came; hairless, screa