Kim+Addonizio

//__**Kaitlynn Williams**__//

Kim Addonizio was born in Washington DC. She attended San Francisco State University where she earned BA and MA .She now lives and teaches workshops in Oakland, California. Addonizio has received many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.




 * What Do Women Want?**

I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what's underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment from its hanger like I'm choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they bury me in. ===**This poem to me is a statement on the stereotypes America has plastered upon women. In our society women are nothing more than objects. We are slowly crawling out of the time where women have no power but we are not out yet. This poem brings to light the issues that are still here. Women are not allowed to wear what they want without being objectified, scorned, or victimized. It takes the speaker and makes her in control of how she is to be seen to the world. She wants to express herself in a flimsy little dress because she has all the right to wear what she wants. She is putting her choice of clothing to use as a show of how little the opinion of others truly matters. We are quick to conform to the desires of everyone else and throw away the things that bring us happiness. When it comes to society, none of us are the same yet we are all expected to fit into the little box of what is considered to be normal. If we are not the same how do we fit into said box? It is almost sickening how we view those who are living to make themselves happy. If you are heavy set and wear something that you are comfortable in you are ridiculed for it because someone else has a problem with it. No one considers the feelings of others when they place a label. They only see the differences in people as wrong and instead of letting someone be content, they feel as though they are supposed to make a change. As long as she is content with herself why should the discontent of others make her conform? In our niche in society this issue is prominent young women are raped by horrible men yet the first statement to pass a person’s tongue is "Look what she was wearing, she asked for it." How does one ask to be raped? Society has made crime acceptable by turning the blame upon the victim. Addonizio has opened my eyes and shown me that no one can justify the flaws in the world by throwing blame upon the oppressed. She has also shown me that when the oppressed rises up against social misdeeds they need to stand strong to their decision. Eventually there will be change, but sadly enough there will have to be a fight for it. Addonizio's use of imagery makes the end very powerful as she says she will "wear it like bones, like skin" it shows how she stands true to her choice to spit on society and please herself. Instead of judging others for what they wear, we should consider that we are playing God by telling people how they should be instead of loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. **===


 * Eating Together**[[image:kimblekorner/dinner.jpg align="right"]]

I know my friend is going, though she still sits there across from me in the restaurant, and leans over the table to dip her bread in the oil on my plate; I know how thick her hair used to be, and what it takes for her to discard her man’s cap partway through our meal, to look straight at the young waiter and smile when he asks how we are liking it. She eats as though starving—chicken, dolmata, the buttery flakes of filo— and what’s killing her eats, too. I watch her lift a glistening black olive and peel the meat from the pit, watch her fine long fingers, and her face, puffy from medication. She lowers her eyes to the food, pretending not to know what I know. She’s going. And we go on eating.

===This poem expresses the way we try to ignore the issues at hand for the sake of others even though we are being torn apart from the inside out. Her friend is slowly dying but refuses to acknowledge it. Instead of fearing how short her life may be she is smiling at the waiter and enjoying her time with her friend. She is no longer the person she used to be when she was in good health yet she tries to hide from herself and her friend what is evident to both. She is dying but hasn't come to terms with the truth. Kim Addonizio's use of personification gives her friends illness even more power as it literally eats her life away. The statement "what's killing her eats, too" is so strong that you can visualize a table for two yet there are three of them dining. It leaves a despairing tone cast upon the entire poem. Her face puffy with thee medication has taken away from her former self. Its easy to assume that her killer is cancer because of the hair loss. This leaves an even more melancholy feeling because cancer is a terrible disease that eats away at many families like a vulture scavenging for food.===


 * G****ood Girl**[[image:kimblekorner/kim addonizio.jpg align="right"]]

Look at you, sitting there being good. After two years you're still dying for a cigarette. And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up? Don't you want to run to the corner right now for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice and a nice lemon slice, wouldn't the backyard that you're so sick of staring out into look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint, the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs — don't you want to mess it all up, to roll around like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren't you a dog anyway, always groveling for love and begging to be petted? You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones, you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds. Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven't they been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn't it time you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara? Sure it's time. You've rolled over long enough. Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt. So get going. Listen: they're howling for you now: up and down the block your neighbors' dogs burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up.

===This poem expresses the way we try to ignore the issues at hand for the sake of others even though we are being torn apart from the inside out. Her friend is slowly dying but refuses to acknowledge it. Instead of fearing how short her life may be she is smiling at the waiter and enjoying her time with her friend. She is no longer the person she used to be when she was in good health yet she tries to hide from herself and her friend what is evident to both. She is dying but hasn't come to terms with the truth. Kim Addonizio's use of personification gives her friends illness even more power as it literally eats her life away. The statement "what's killing her eats, too" is so strong that you can visualize a table for two yet there are three of them dining. It leaves a despairing tone cast upon the entire poem. Her face puffy with thee medication has taken away from her former self. Its easy to assume that her killer is cancer because of the hair loss. This leaves an even more melancholy feeling because cancer is a terrible disease that eats away at many families like a vulture scavenging for food.===


 * You Don't Know What Love Is**

You Don't Know What Love Is but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.