5. DETROIT ANNIE, HITCHHIKING from THE COMMON WOMAN

Her words pour out as if her throat were a broken
artery and her mind were cut-glass, carelessly handied.
You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great
dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.
Sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.
When she is cruel, site is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
Fishermen think perhaps she’s a fish, but they’re all
fools. She aged out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid. Now when she
smells danger, she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.
She leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don’t mind.
The common woman is as common
as the reddest wine.

--Judy Grahn

Berkeley’s poetry Walk was laid in October 2003 along Edison Street between Shattuck and Milvia Streets. The route includes 128 metal plates with excerpts from songs, each of which is related in one way or another to the city of Berkeley.

The current sign features a poem by the American writer and poet, Judy Grahn (1940). The feminist and lesbian Grahan lectures and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Studies, and in other places