Words Remain Unsealed

At Tupperware parties
The ladies sold nothing but containers
Full of nothing

Hostesses in hose and skirts
Demo-ed the patented airtight seal
Taught housewives how to burp
Like expectant madonnas at a new mother class

The optimism of a starburst lid
Avocado Green
Burnt Orange
Harvest Gold
Cheap hydrocarbons in every kitchen

Genius commercial speech
Plastic dyed a hue named for the color of ripening wheat

Grasshopper oil pumpjacks
Fueled the Tupperware party revolution
Powered by women converted to capital
And party games

*

When I interviewed at the big Silicon Valley tech company the young woman in the break room
saw the red apples among the cornucopia of bananas, grapes, oranges, snacks and kombucha.
She said, “Damn it. There aren’t any green apples. I can’t think unless I have the green apples”


Amy Beth Sisson is struggling to emerge, toad-like, from the mud outside of Philly. Her poetry has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon and is upcoming in The River Heron Review and The Shoutflower. She is currently an MFA student studying poetry at Rutgers Camden and a Graduate Assistant for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.