If your mother's like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe
you'll get cooked by getting evicted

since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing.

And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open:
the fathers can creep up on anything when it's still too wet

to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed

or cook at the carnivals with the can-do caroling
and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch

and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on

until they're cooking the drift of you wanting a whole bayou up in you
and cooking and cooking the gist

of you needing your crannies hot with a good man's body-silt

until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers
and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver

and Ajax too and Minwax Oh

in this the dumbstruck story of the American female
as a cut of terracotta and some kindling in a dress

while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.