She’s a brick house.
She’s the one, the only one built like an amazon.
—The Commodores

The boys, they called her
an amazon.  In grammar school,
wearing size fourteens,
she was broader than most
of them would ever become.

The history of
the Amazon women
only seems foreign

to us.  “We’re Eastern
European vegetable soup,” she says.
Polish, German, Slovak.
A stout and solid broth
about to boil.

The Amazons
of Greek mythology—
a tribe of warrior women—
kept the men domestic, fucked
only for girl babies, killed

all the boys before
they got big enough
to rise against

their mothers.  My grandmother
once told me, “Someday
you’ll be built like a brick shithouse.”

I could not believe that
would be a good thing.
But she smiled,
she spoke the words like arrows,
like throwing a javelin,

and hitting a bare-breasted Greek sculpture,
knocking it over
for good.