Superman, and: This Isn't a Revenge Poem

Superman

Superman was my brother's hero, nerdy Clark Kent
with his horn-rimmed glasses just like my brother's,
transformed into someone who could leap tall buildings
in a single bound. Lois Lane loved him though I don't
think anyone ever said. This was 1950's TV

after all and the girl was always the foil for the hero,
the one who helped but never took center stage.
I never wanted to be the little helpmate. I wanted
to be the one who made things happen, though there
were no super girls in 1950 – this was right

after the war and when the men came back home,
they wanted their jobs back, they wanted their women
in aprons and home to put their dinners on the table as
soon as they walked in the door. I'd seen my mother
in her homemade apron struggling to cook everything

from scratch, cooking and canning and cleaning.
Domesticity never appealed to me, though it didn't
occur to me that I would not marry. I was supposed to
marry. Everyone did. But when I graduated from high
school I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to get

married like some of my girlfriends, married and
pregnant before they graduated or right after. I didn't
want to go to William Paterson College to be
a Kindergarten teacher as my mother wanted so I could
be at home when my children came home from school.

I want to go to college to be a writer, I announced, not
listening when my accountant cousin said it was
the most impractical ambition he'd ever heard. I want
to be a writer, I insisted, knowing, without knowing
how to express it, that I would never play Lois Lane

to a Superman. Tenacious as a bulldog, I kept trying,
even when I know my cousin was right. It was an
impractical ambition, but one I wouldn't trade for any
other, knowing words were the only way I could ever
leap tall buildings in a single bound.

This Isn't a Revenge Poem

We went to the Blue Note to listen to jazz
or to McSorley's tavern to sit where Dylan Thomas
sat. We wanted to be bohemian, but we were college
students living at home and when we dated, we took

your friend Bill with us because his girl went to UConn
and didn't come home on the weekends. Bill told me
I had eyes as deep as the Indian Ocean and I sat
between the two of you on our Friday night trips

to New York City. You insisted I kiss Bill good night
when I kissed you, though I knew he was in love with
me and I half in love with him and what was I thinking
when I let you pull me into the dune grass at Island

Beach State Park and sneak me into your house
and up the stairs to your bedroom, where one day,
we thought your mother had come home and you
made me hide in the attic. You were the only man

I ever dated who wasn't blond and blue-eyed
and at first, I said no and then you pushed and
pushed until I said yes. I slept with you the first time
in the same way when you led me through the snow

to the construction shack on the site where your
father worked and we made love, if you could
call it that, making love on a desk littered with dust
in a construction shack in the first snowstorm

of winter, and we made love almost every night
anywhere you could talk me into it, the front seat
of your car, the back seat, your boyhood room, the
woods in Stokes State Forest, little fifties

Catholic girl breaking free of all the rules that told me
what I could and could not do and I'd...