Women and their Bombs by Wendy Lee In your poem, a woman drinks tea and then turns herself into a bomb. You worry at our scarred kitchen table about that other, famous poet who wrote about a woman and a bomb. You dislike repetition. Two women with bombs might be one woman too many. I anchor two tea bags to the handles of our mugs, thinking about the pair of nameless women, explosives adhered to their waists with masking tape. I think about the last piece of bread they ate— plain maybe, the food of martyrdom, or maybe slathered thick with butter, one last small pleasure. Walking afterward into crowded marketplaces and bustling streets, looking or not into the eyes of the soon dead. Finders slipping over the detonator like rosary beads a grandmother once rubbed smooth with the broken sweat of living. And then, like magicians, each woman turning herself into air, arms outstretched to welcome the sensation of breaking. In the meantime, the hot water Wendy Lee |