What Do Women Want?
Kim Addonizio
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.
Response:
What I really love about Kim Addonizio’s work is that she
tends to keep things from sounding pretty—what I mean is that she tries her
best not to write her poems as if she were some other writer. Rather, she
writes it as it is—she doesn’t make an image beautiful, so much as she tells
the truth about the image. With her poem, “What Do Women Want?”, it’s no
different. The beginning lines about the dress, about how she wants it flimsy
and cheap, is not what most people consider being the typical ideal. Rather,
it’s more a reality to get a dress like that (something durable, but not too
expensive). Because of this, she portrays herself as a woman with a sense of
mystery, rather than someone anyone would see anywhere. I also liked how in
this poem she juxatpozes the act of walking out in a scandalous dress with the
images of the townspeople going about there day. It really shows just how much
she wants the red dress for a sense of power and authority, making the image
stronger.
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