Untitled ("We knew things before men did")

A bitter declaration of female knowledge and Appalachian violence, mixing domestic refusal with political and bodily threat.

Titled 'We knew things before men did', the body opens 'We knew diaster' in a place 'Downwhere violence / is like chalk on an old black board', where 'Rape and murder is a way of life / and so is organic foood'. The speaker refuses intimacy outright - 'I would not sleep / with a man or a women', 'No one shares my bed' - and lands on the worn domestic nerve of 'saying sush / to the kids' alongside owning 'a disk, / of "The Outlaw Josie Weles"'.

The title asserts a precedence of women's knowing, and the poem fills it with disaster as the thing known first: violence so routine it is 'like chalk on an old black board', erasable and re-written daily. The brutal yoking of 'Rape and murder' with 'organic foood' as equal 'way[s] of life' is the poem's signature move - horror and wholesomeness flattened into the same Appalachian normal. The speaker's blanket refusal of any bedmate, man or woman, reads less as preference than as a withdrawal from a world where 'The goverment draws our guys out' and predation is ambient. That the poem ends on shushing children and a scratched disc of 'The Outlaw Josie Weles' is telling: outlaw mythology and frayed motherhood are the only company she keeps, a Western about a wronged man standing in for the protection no one else provides.