Roberta Spivek                                                            

 

 

A Drink in a Berkeley Bar on International Women’s Day               

 

You stand there naked in the bar,
your flesh like silk,
your flesh like summer wheat,
sun shining on a wheat field
in the south of France,
the grain suffused with light
and paper-thin red poppies
someone should bring you,  
to lay against your cheek.

Your buttocks flare behind you  
like a hill, or fields erupting into hills,
or flanks of horses moving through the wheat.

An oval mirror gives us your face.
We find it pale and puzzled,
as if the artist couldn’t find you
or you wouldn’t let him in,
or maybe you were tired.
A wooden chair just waits
for you to rest your weight.
It anchors down the mirror
circling your breasts.
They say you’ve nursed.
Your hair is thick and dark.

For seventeen years you’ve endured this,
naked in a bar,
one arm lifted to your head,
the fire dancing on your thighs
and legs bent thickly at the knee
like the statues of Greek women.

And still our liquor softens up your flesh
until the paint begins to swim,
till women must avert their eyes
and men can barely keep
from reaching out and touching you
and I, a woman, can barely keep
from reaching out and touching you.

 

 

 

  

 

Roberta Spivek is a Philadelphia poet with poems published or soon to be published in The New Croton Review, Pure Slush, Friends Journal, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Quo Modo. Her poems have been included in several anthologies, including, recently, Stand With Ukraine (Moonstone Press). She has an MA in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania and is part of a longstanding Philadelphia women's poetry circle.