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Nearly 60 years on, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” still holds its own in the discussion of traditional domestic roles and women’s sense of fulfillment in life. Middlebury poet Rebecca Orten, featured this week, leaves much up to interpretation between her eloquent lines of imagery, but the theme that undoubtedly peeks through in modern echo is the persistence of antiquated notions that still today tether women in the context of the home and family.
Erasure
By Rebecca Orten, 16, Middlebury
I. Dremel uvula
We are girls. To hope is to expect. To revert back
to sticky hands, to beg between tantrum sobs
for lullabies. We are girls, we polish
our sentiments (with sandpaper tongues)
down to shining minimums
before bending at the waist to spit them
onto the kitchen table, beside the clay vase
of cut carnations. We girls wipe away excess saliva, knowing
nothing tastes as cloying as an apology. We girls dance
to the clatter of amethysts
on expectant dinner plates. To the fine china shards
we tape to brick walls. Girls, girls,
almost as demanding as
the word pretty.
II. Gardeneress
The gardeneress twists submission from silence
like warm bathwater from a washcloth
and hangs them both up to dry. Looking at bookshelves
the same way she yanked out her son’s teeth
in the dull living room light. He watches as she
puts on shackles and calls them jewelry, he worries
he is not doing enough
with the words that lined her womb. How many
Aprils did it take to bury the anger?
Rage nestling reticent in the garden bed
among deliberately labeled seeds, soiling the vegetables.
He chokes on carrot cake and
wonders how many novels
she stirred into the batter.
III. Pollock’s pointillism
There’s no beauty in carving, craving
metal drilled through bones, light enough to hang
from the front porch like a wind chime. This I know,
thanks to sweaty palms and swaying, fox chasing rabbit
around the feverish meadow of my belly. Repetition
is numbness, why Prometheus gave us fire.
Repetition is the bathroom mirror fogging as shower water
grows scalding behind me, 27 more seconds
of plank. Michelangelo in a Monet,
my body and me. Unhinging reverberations: skin, skin, skin.
But one cannot live in brushstrokes. Or estimation, clouded mirrors.
Once numb, what is there left to achieve? Gold is as
good as straw when I
cannot feel my fingertips.
