The Ladies’ Handy Book

Like so many others
of your generation,
you died by Nembutal,
and if it hadn’t been
forty years late,
might have even
been glamourous
in that Cassady-Monroe
kind of way.

You left me your face,
your appetite for men,
your ability to say precisely
the wrong thing,
and see everything in
the worst possible light.

Like you, my first conscious desire
was to be a boy, because
I learned early, like you
that they were allowed to do things
and people listened when they talked,
if only just to scold them for it, after.
I learned that the only way
to get respect from a boy was
to get naked or
make him a sandwich.
I practised making
sandwiches.

At my engagement party
you had one word of advice,
“Don’t.”
But by then I was more like you
than either of us
had yet foreseen,
and so, of course
I did.