This is called "Divisions of Labor."
And for me, this poem comes very much
out of being a part-time women's studies teacher
and trying to teach history and activism and theory all
together and some of the contradictions of trying
to do that.
"Divisions of Labor"
"The revolutions wheel, compromise,
utter their statements.
A new magazine appears, mastheaded with old names.
An old magazine polishes up its act
with deconstructions of the prose of Malcolm X.
The women in the back rows of politics
are still licking thread to slip into the needle's eye,
trading bones for plastic, splitting pods for necklaces
to sell to the cruise ships, producing
immaculate first communion dresses with flat iron
and irresolute hot water.
Still fitting the microscopic golden wires
into the silicon chips.
Still teaching, watching the children quenched
in the crossfire alleys, the flash flood gullies,
the kerosene flash fires.
The women whose labor remakes the world each
and every morning.
I have seen a woman sitting between the stove
and the stars, her fingers singed from snuffing out
the candles of pure theory.
Finger and thumb both scorched, I
have felt that sacred wax blister my hand."