MARGARET STETZ

Ida B. Wells Puts on Her Corset

She should have been Justice in flowing robes,
allowed to spread beyond
the white borders of newsprint,
the edges of photographs,
and stays.
"Ain't I a Woman?" Truth demanded.
"And a Lady?" asks Ida B,
respectable to a tea, a salon,
turned out in lace,
costumed to slip through,
a mutton-leg sleeve
swathed around a revolver.
Standing straight as speech,
bones, stripped from the dead,
hold her up, never in,
as she expounds, expands,
pressed against the frame of fashion
and, like Frida, paints images over its canvas shell—
not a sickle surely, but yes, a hammer
and the silhouettes of strange fruit.

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