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What size is she? The bra woman asks.

You want something that will support them honey, looking at me with a wink.

My mother looks straight at my chest. Oh she’s good size. She’s out of that

training bra phase. I want her to have something that will hold them up proper.

Them, them, them they say.

Like they’re two midgets I keep strapped to my chest.

The whole time I stand there while these two women one my own kin,

discuss the maintenance and storage of my two dependents.

The worst is yet to come, the dressing room.

I hate the damn dressing room, the mirrors waiting to laugh at me,

women running in and out half-naked with things showing

that I didn’t even see on my own body.

I stand there half-naked and pissed. Mama on one side,

the bra woman on the other, I feel like a rag doll under interrogation

as they begin fixing straps, poking me, raising me up, snapping the back,

underwire digging my breasts a grave.

The bras clamp down onto me, shaping my breasts out to pristine bullets,

with no movement, no pulse, no life, just sitting fix up

like my mother wanted real proper.

I will never forgive my mother for this, I keep thinking to myself.

Looking blank face at my reflection I started thinking about how my brothers

never have to shop for undergarments, why couldn’t I have been born a boy?

I hate undergarments.

Mama looks at my face. Don’t you like any of them?

No, I say. Mama I hate this, please can we go?

Then she goes into her lecture on becoming a woman

and being responsible for woman upkeep.

After we are halfway through the inventory

mama looks at me wasting away in a sea of bras and takes pity on me.

All right, I think we have enough to last you for a while. Let’s check out.

I don’t get happy too quick ’cause I know that bra woman

still lurks about and if she senses my excitement that we are leaving

she will come with more white bras.

We make our way to the check out counter

and the bra woman rings us up.

Oh honey you picked out some beautiful bras, she says.

Just remember hand wash. How about bury, I want to ask.

She and my mother talk about how they are just right

and will do the trick for me with no bouncing at all.

The Summer Day

MARY OLIVER

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Living

DENISE LEVERTOV

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems

each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun,

each day the last day.

A red salamander

so cold and so

easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet

and long tail. I hold

my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

I stepped from plank to plank

EMILY DICKINSON

I stepped from plank to plank,

A slow and cautious way;

The stars about my head I felt,

About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch.

This gave me that precarious gait

Some call experience.

to my last period

LUCILLE CLIFTON

well girl, goodbye,

after thirty-eight years.

thirty-eight years and you

never arrived

splendid in your red dress

without trouble for me

somewhere, somehow.

now it is done,

and i feel just like

the grandmothers who,

after the hussy has gone,

sit holding her photograph

and sighing, wasn