It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse by Marge Piercy

It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse

by Marge Piercy

(published in her 1992 book, Mars and Her Children, Knopf)

We have marsupial instincts, women

who lug purses as big as garbage igloos,

women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders:

we are hiding the helpless greedy naked worms

of our intentions shivering in chaos.

In bags the size of Manhattan studio apartments,

we carry not merely the apparatus of neatness

and legality, cards, licenses, combs,

mirrors, spare glasses, lens fluid,

but hex...