"The Woman Who Was Left at the Altar," the poem.
"She calls her shadow Juan, looking back often
as she walks.
She has grown fat, breasts huge as reservoirs.
She once opened her blouse in church
to show the silent town what a plentiful mother she could be.
Since her old mother died, buried in black,
she lives alone.
Out of the lace, she made curtains
for her room, doilies out of the veil.
They are now yellow as malaria.
She hangs live chickens from her waist to sell,
walks to the town swinging her skirts of flesh.
She doesn't speak to anyone.
Dogs follow the scent of blood to be shed.
In their hungry, yellow eyes, she sees his face.
She takes him to the knife time after time."
[WHISTLE]
I know.
Men usually don't like that poem, you know.
[APPLAUSE]
It has knives in it and chickens getting their heads cut off.
And I wondered about that.
Because I've really never even seen
that happen, except once, when I saw an aunt of mine
decapitate a chicken.
And she was doing it just for dinner,
not because she hated men.
And so when I dug back in my memory,
I found my grandmother talking.
And that's why I wrote these essays.