(for a Betty Crocker Box as Litter in a Park)
For starters, she didn’t exist.
This what you must know about almost every woman
you see packaged behind a screen of any kind, or glossy,
on paper and certainly, in any religious doctrine
you were raised with.
For starters, she was dreamed up by an ad company,
her hairstyle changed with the seasons, her red & white
garb with the eras.
For starters, she was a soup, then she changed
to the cake of cakes: soft, vanilla, suitable
for all occasions, unable to offend.
She ended up in every kitchen in America as a cook
or a baker, a bowl or a pan.
For starters, she wasn’t a man.
♦
Catherine Owen is the author of 15 collections of poetry and prose including such litter-inspired works as Cusp/detritus (Anvil Press 2006) and berm: eclogues (red nettle press 2009). Her latest collection of poems is Riven (ECW, 2020) and her anthology of 24 memoirs by Canadian writers on mourning and place is called Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020). A Vancouverite, she lives in Delilah, a 1905 house in Edmonton.
♦♦♦
“…for the inequality they refuse to erase
for the discrimination they say to my face”
The Litter I See Project 