The Women of Long Island – Queer Version

I want to write a poem for the lesbians from Long Island who were thrown out of their parent’s homes 40 years ago like me.

You see, Suzanne, you don’t have to have those awkward conversations about why you’re
not married at the holidays,

Or have Ellen, my sister who hated me from the day that Demon Spawn was born, try to make me wear Spanks at Annie and Steve’s wedding.

And could you pleeeease ask Lauren to wax her face again and shave her legs because she
is the hairiest thing I have ever seen,

And you can’t just walk around like that in Long Island in those God-damned Gertrude Stein orthopedic shoes for Chrissake your Uncle Sonny and Aunt Katherine will be here any God-damned minute if they took the fucking Meadowbrook instead of the God-damned LIE like I told them to.

Are you listening to me, Nancy, or do I have to slap your face again and throw out those Rita Mae Brown books?

Is that blonde your new God-damned girlfriend, oh I hate her, you know what she said she said, you know, we both love Nancy, Joan, over tea and that was not the exactly the right thing to say to a Leo, my mother,

So, Joan just slammed her tea cup down on the Lenox saucer, Shit, Margaret,
You should have just shut up because my mother took out the God-damned Lenox,

And you paid for our trip to Vermont, me wearing the thick brown leather jacket she couldn’t afford to buy and maybe that’s what pissed her off most, but there was Joan,

Cutting me off, making me homeless, hoping the Malpedes’ and the Karmer’s would approve of her, but they never did,

Even when my mother told me Mr. Kramer used to make Mrs. Kramer have sex with him even when she didn’t want to,

And she would come to the house to have tea and cry to my mother,
And I told her I wanted to be different,

And I was.

Nancy Klepsch, a poet and retired English teacher, has a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in education. She is the co-host of the Second Sunday @ 2 open mic for poetry and prose in Troy, NY, and is the co-founder of Riverside Community Press and the co-director of the Queer Poetry Prize and River Poems: Poems on the Porch. Her poems have been published in Fence, The Altar Collective, Sinister Wisdom, Oberon, 13th Moon, and Chronogram among others, and online on Barzakh and Albany Poets. Her first book is called god must be a boogie man (Riverside Community Press), and a recent chapbook is named The Battle (Bone Machine Press). Her work will be included in the soon-to-be published book Writing the Land from the New York Rensselaer Plateau.  www.nancyklepsch.com