Likes a Strong Woman

Grandma slathered
makeup on her dun-colored

face. Santa left behind plastic
busts we practiced on: eye

liner and velvet
chalky blue for giant Barbie’s half

closed horsehair
lashes. Off

limits: Grandad’s walnut
lengths to saw like Red Riding Hood’s woodsman, grain

smooth as Grandma’s penciled eyebrows plucked
away for good.

Mom champions her spackled
on cream blush because Your father

likes it. I learned to keep a hymnal
on my head, smile only as wide as my top

teeth show, and nod while my heart
constricts like the claw

all our women dig
into a child’s arm. Don’t get

smart. Sit
up straight and graze lacquered

fingernails across the depression in any
man’s upper back. Freckles and chapped

lips be damned. I fanned
out glamazons strutting through Vogue on the pumpkin

pile wall to wall. I married
the one who pushed Dad’s

wheelchair, haloed leg levitating before
his wreckage, mustache

intact, to the funeral’s scratchy
turquoise and balsawood

altar the shade of Grandma’s pooled
foundation in the crevice

of her cheek, her
girdle’s hooks and eyes correct

as Miss Burgett’s fourth grade
tables set for groups of four: Lloyd

Cross’s silver tooth chastens my cigar
box of Crayolas though mine has all the shades of blue. Mom

dies in the crash, and so does Aunt
Pam, and Uncle Marvin proposes her sister

Karen wear her clothes. She weeps into an avocado
handset, declines his offered drink. My friends guffaw

at my joke about the man
in the grocery who struck

up conversation. The punch line is
I sleep with him to make him leave

me alone. Nobody likes
a strong woman.