THE FINAL CHIRON REVIEW: The last issue of Chiron Review is now available. I am thrilled to have four poems included in this special glbtq edition, along with work by such great poets and writers as Quentin Crisp, Jeff Mann, Will Inman, Shane Allison, Carl Miller Daniels, Laurel Speer, Michael Huxley, Phillip Ward, Hugh B. Fox, David Cope, Ian Ayres, Felice Picano, Hugh B. Fox, Kathleen Bryson and Jillian Lauren. Chiron Review came to literary life in the Spring of 1982, and has since published some of the most respected names in literature.Editor and publisher Michael Hathaway published such greats as Charles Bukowski, William Stafford, Marge Piercy, Gavin Dillard, Edward Field, Antler, Robert Peters, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Janice Eidus, Felice Picano, Lyn Lifshin, Will Inman, Richard Kostelanetz, Lorri Jackson, Ruth Moon Kempher, Charles Webb and a host of others, well-known and new. I am thrilled to join their ranks, but saddened that this is the last issue of this always informative mag. Copies of this issue are available, as well as back issues. Visit the Chiron Review website for more information on ordering.
Here's one of my poems from the last issue:
Wonder Woman
The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in
G.J. Joe for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms.
I wanted to surrender my guns for the golden lasso,
more than the dolls, mind you, I wanted to be
Wonder Woman.
I don’t remember who stitched the costume,
blue underwear with glued on stars, a red bustier
wrapped around my seven year old sunken chest,
the golden eagle oddly deflated.
The head band and bullet deflecting cuffs made
of cardboard and the length of rope my father had
spray-painted gold in the yard hooked at my side.
I lassoed my poor dad first, demanded the truth,
but there was no magic in those rough, twisted fibers.
If the rope could have squeezed out an ounce
of what he was really thinking,
I would have been dressed up as Superman or Batman,
a manly cape flying out behind me as I ran
around the back yard, hidden from the neighbors,
while my dad devised a way to build
Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.
Comments
Someone else began the hand-wringing, allowing as how no one ever did that to Ken. Quite a few of us got a laugh out of that, knowing that GI Joe was a lot more fun to torture, given his movable joints.
I inherited my mom's love for Wonder Woman, but actually owned a Malibu Skipper. I braided her hair, dressed her in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans ripped off from one of my brother's boy dolls, and rubber-banded a small orange plastic stone knife to one of her hands. She lived off the land under the canna plants.
Wonder Woman kicks ass. You couldn't have had a better role model. Oh, sorry, we feminists aren't supposed to say "kicks ass" -- too violent an image! ;-)
Robin
Wait until you read the "Bionic Woman" poem. :)
-Dustin