Poem for the Day

Not done one of these in aaaages, so I'm here to rectify it. It's an odd choice, because Sharon Olds is not a touchstone poet for me; I admire her, but she's not a poet I think of as influential or informative to my own process. All that aside, this is a poem that gut punched me when I first read it years ago, it's one I think about often, especially lately.

The Language of the Brag
I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw, I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms and my straight posture and quick electric muscles to achieve something at the centre of a crowd, the blade piercing the bark deep, the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock. I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body, some heroism, some American achievement beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self, magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot and watched the boys play. I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around my belly big with cowardice and safely, my stool black with iron pills, my huge breasts oozing mucus, my legs swelling, my hands swelling, my face swelling and darkening, my hair falling out, my inner sex stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife. I have lain down. I have lain down and sweated and shaken and passed blood and feces and water and slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have passed the new person out and they have lifted the new person free of the act and wiped the new person free of that language of blood like praise all over the body. I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing, I and the other women this exceptional act with the exceptional heroic body, this giving birth, this glistening verb, and I am putting my proud American boast right here with the others.