Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

American, got very upset that some people have taken the poem personally
rather than as a response to similar feelings that have gone the other way for
too long). My sense is that Trask meant to evoke such a response ("woman,"
after all, is generic as well as specific). Here’s the poem, whose rhetoric is not
at all exceptional:
I could kick
your face, puncture
both eyes.
You deserve this kind
of violence.
No more vicious
tongues, obscene
lies.
Just a knife
slitting your tight
little heart
for all my people
under your feet
for all those years
lived smug and wealthy
off our land
parasite arrogant.
A fist
in your painted