A little bit of Anne...

This is the key to it.
This is the key to everything.
Preciously.

I am worse than the gamekeepers children,
picking for dust and bread.
Here I am drumming up perfume.

It is not that I am cattle to be eaten.
It is not that I am some sort of street.
But your hands found me like an architect.

Later I measured my size against movie stars.
I didn't measure up.
Something between my shoulder blades was there. But never enough.

Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters and rising out of the ashes I cried my sex will be transfixed!

So tell me anything but track me like a climber.
For here is the eye, here is the jewel, here is the excitement the nipple learns.

I am unbalanced- but I am not mad with snow. I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering...

I burn the way money burns.


Anne Sexton