if Emily Dickinson was a stripper
She'd be Candy Barr or Bonnie Parker
kissing bad men in the shadows of the
glinting stripper pole: Martha Graham
was a circus cooch dancer before
art seized her atomic heart;
before the Jewish plains rose from
shetl ghost pogroms foretold
in Midwestern American daydreams
of iron & cement; the world divided
into Jim Crow hell's gates to heaven;
should Plath have been a beatnik &
met Bettie into **** converting to
Christ w/ Arbus the Jehovah's Witness
all stripping at Billy's *******
on the sharp corner of the Ironbound
where O'Keefe started taking ****
pictures as a teen well into her
twenties & into the unknown desert;
if every stripper were a poet who would
be their readers; if every pervert were a
reader what would they be reading