Issue 30, Remnants

Three poems

by Barbara Crooker • • Issue 15 • 06.10.2008 

Feminism

When I was a girl, I loved to play with the buttons
in my mother’s sewing chest: mother-of-pearl,
tortoise shell, velvet covered, rhinestone studded;

some with two tiny holes, like nostrils, some
with four tiny holes, like stars. Unlike snowflakes,
many alike. More like the shells that litter the sea,

or stars in the opaline sky. So many choices
to pick from, and how to decide?
So many options, in the big button box of life:

career/family, home/office
(all women are working women)
but always, some stitches are coming unraveled,

there’s a worn spot where an elbow’s poked through,
always there’s something that needs to be mended,
or, by changing the buttons, a bright new look given to old cloth.

continue: 1 2 3

Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker

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Barbara Crooker has published poems in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Denver Quarterly; anthologies including Worlds in their Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall) and Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press); eleven chapbooks; and two full-length collections: Radiance, which won the Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Line Dance, recently out from Word Press. She has received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, the W. B. Yeats Society of NY Prize (Grace Schulman, judge) and the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award (Stanley Kunitz, judge).