ALL THE FEMINIST POETS features a single poem and an interview from a feminist poet that we love.
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Melissa Broder is the author of three collections of poems, most recently SCARECRONE. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, Tin House, The Iowa Review, Fence, The Missouri Review, Guernica, and elsewhere.
THOUSANDS
He is told to send a lock of hair
but instead sends a dossier
of charts. There are bullets,
vectors, single choice answers.
No questions. On every page
appears a yellowish husband.
The husband is a sick man.
I want the diagram-sender
sicker. I want every man
fainting in a reservoir
of contaminated water.
I have black chrysanthemums
in each hole and a gypsy smell.
My climax shakes the basin.
I hold out one hand for every man
but I’m looking at my snake.
