Beginning with the swagger of my palm to the squeezing sensation in my ribcage
I realize that the modern woman is alone among everyone else
from the creative orthopedic doctor whose joints resemble that of an
air craft plane your father designed in 1953
to the zany business owner that counts their own steps and
watches the calorie intake of the television dribble
there’s a bit of resentment on her polished fingernails as
she watches feminist prose on stage of a bar with no name
and she drinks cordially, the same intake that a midnight taxi driver
takes to keep his sanity, just enough to recognize street signs
and forget people’s faces
she sits in her dining room table and admires the lump in her throat
never feeling at home with dinner guests so she invents
party games that freefall off her legs into the carpet
that used to belong to a woman with no legs and a smoker’s mouth
but she doesn’t know this because she got it for three dollars
from her neighbor who isn’t alive anymore
and the blood stains of the old woman’s breath have long
disappeared and it’s appealing, yes very appealing
the modern woman is alone among everyone else
that comes foremost, thus the shy boys become isolated women
and the cycle of who is who begins to spin but the laundry won’t stop
piling in a corner of a room
and as soon as it stops the clothes drip from gender to gender  
between the tiles of the convenience store, between the
local gas station where men sit in their pickup trucks staring
at the spit on the ground and wondering whose mouth
it regurgitated from
and the lights become more fluorescent, more menacing  
so the solitary companions start coming later and later
until the sun sets and the lights are off and the only way to
know if another heart is beating is by crawling on the floor
hoping to find a pulse instead of an unsteady table, or a broken
chair or window howling but one acclimates to such conditions
while the modern woman is most intellectual of all
there’s a primitiveness, a strange longing to look behind her
to continue with watchful eyes darting long glances at the past
and sighing with relief that this is now and the future looks down with
convincing not conniving glares but still she falls into the
pit of her own stomach and memorizes the world upside down
the words jostle about,  the approaches of curious hands
become welcoming and the universe that once was an oyster
melts into a pearl with a sharp edge, a tooth made
out of pretty godforsaken, the speculated
creation of something eternally ****** will always be ******
but you don’t have to agree with it, there’s no reason to
shimmy into a container of shouts when you could
easily assimilate into a vat of unknowness, to
belong to something so you don’t have to be anything
yes indeed the modern woman stands alone in these dark ages
but the swagger has been reduced to a soft calamity, the
squeezing sensations in my rib cage have been swallowed to a
slow pull, grasp, released clench of a heart