Summary

“Ode to the Word Pussy” begins with the speaker saying she could justify the word by “defending the feline,” but admits that such a debate does not interest her (38). She decides instead to dedicate her ode to the sound of the word itself. Throughout the entire third stanza, she describes the physical process of saying the word, how one must “press their lips together/before spilling out your name,” then when “the vowel is snatched back” before “the lips open/to a smile and out comes the happy soprano/of an elongated e” (38). The speaker then shifts her examination to the dictionary definition of the word, saying “Webster defines you as inflated/or swelled, which is to say you should always be just that” (39). She concludes the poem by acknowledging that “many will call you profanity,” but that “this is an ode to...