Not So Little Women

The Child And The Stairs

by Moniza Alvi

I hear you running up and down the stairs,
but the minute I grab hold of the banister
you turn your face the other way.
Surely, you’re my childhood, visiting
      a favourite place,
and hiding awkwardly from me?
I was once a tenant in your house.
Now I know you from your invisibility.
You prowl around me when no one’s looking,
and hurry away, as from an illicit meeting.
Well, I won’t admit I’ve recognised you.
But you must also keep our secret,
this constant rumour of my early footsteps
on the present-day stairs.

The Usual Suspects or a Chronological List of the Ways Men Have Referred to my Breasts:

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

1. Look at them jiggle, the boys
   would say in middle school gym, before
   I learned the art of sports bras.
2. They shrunk! Those same
   boys whispered when I stopped
   eating in high school and spent
   lunchtime running the outdoor track,
   still a stranger to under-wire or Armor.
3. Is she the one who talks a lot
   and has those big boobs? A guy asked
   my college boyfriend, who nodded
   proudly and cupped his hands
   around invisible breasts as though
   they grew from his chest.
4. Beeeee Beeee, a drunk and lonely poet
   trailed the air fingertips away
   from the rhinestones on my shirt
   as we left whatever bar we’d lingered at
   too long. You want me looking at them,
   he said, otherwise you wouldn’t dress like that.
5. I don’t see them as saggy, my husband
   said once, meaning this as compliment.
   It’s probably because of all the running
   without a good bra. I appreciate the way he tried
   to make my body less my fault.
6. I feel like I can say this to you, the 70-year-old
   search committee chair put his hand
   on my shoulder just after I finished
   meeting with the faculty but before
   the elevator doors swung open.
   You are looking a lot bustier than this morning,
   so we best get you to the pumping room.
   He was kind enough to check
   if I was comfortable with people knowing
   I am nursing, and when I said I was,
   he introduce me this way at my job talk,
   no bio, just gratitude to the administrative staff
   who got up early that morning to tape paper,
   just for me, over the windows facing the hallway,
   transforming a man’s office into my own
   private room. Julia could pump in peace and is now ready
   to share her work, he said. This event wouldn’t be possible
   without them, meaning the staff
   but also breasts.
7. They’re my favorite part of you, Mama,
   my son says, pressing into them hard,
   with hands or head or even knees. They’re just
   so soft, he repeats. Years since he’s stopped
   nursing, I am still teaching him
   to ask permission for such touch.

Woman Holding A Balance

By Linda Pastan 

Vermeer, 1664

The picture within
the picture is The Last
Judgment, subdued
as wallpaper in the background.
And though the woman
holding the scales
is said to be weighing
not a pearl or a coin
but the heft of a single soul,
this hardly matters.
It is really the mystery
of the ordinary
we’re looking at—the way
Vermeer has sanctified
the same light that enters
our own grimed windows
each morning, touching
a cheek, the fold
of a dress, a jewelry box
with perfect justice.

Woman Writers

by Lý Lan

Each of us has her own bedroom and study
but Susan and I share a bathroom.
Once she opened the door and found me
standing naked before the mirror.
I saw her many times putting on makeup
and please do not reveal this dying her hair
and massaging the wrinkles in her face.
We also share the kitchen and sometimes
at midnight I come to drink water and find her
sitting at the table with a cup of tea.

She doesn’t know when the man she embraced
twenty years became a strange shape
in her house on her bed and with her body.
She doesn’t know why the man she loved
wanted to change everything and no longer
knew her or had never known her.
She wrote a book about women that won a prize
and found another man after her divorce
she has two sons one studying in America
one wandering through Europe.

She speaks from the heart, her Asian figure
animated, though she speaks slowly
pronouncing each word and laughs
in clanging peals. In the morning a man came
and sat outside her room. When I opened
the door for the morning paper I nodded to him.
Winter came suddenly. They went together
to the park to exercise. After a snow storm
the grass was buried. Trees tried to ward off
the snow that fell constantly day and night.
She packed her things and headed south—
The young man? Never saw him again.

Translated by Lý Lan and Joseph Duemer