The Oven Loves the TV Set

By Heather McHugh b. 1948 Heather McHugh

Stuck on the fridge, our favorite pin-up girl

is anorexic. On the radio we have a riff

of Muzak sax, and on the mind

a self-help book. We sprawl all evening, all

alone, in the unraised ranch;

all day the company we kept

kept on incorporating. As for the world

of poverty, we did our best, thanks

to a fund of Christian feeling

and mementos from

Amelia, the foster child, who has

the rags and seven photogenic sisters we prefer

in someone to be saved. She's proof

Americans have got a heart

to go with all that happy

acumen you read about. We're known to love

a million little prettinesses,

decency, and ribbons on

the cockapoo. (But who

will study alphabets for hands? Who gives

a damn what patience goes into

a good wheelchair? Who lugs the rice

from its umpteen stores

to the ends of the earth, to even

one dead-end? Not we.)

Our constitutional pursuit

is happiness, i.e.

somebody nice, and not

too fat, we can have

for our personal friend.

Source: Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)

Biography

Poet Heather McHugh’s work is noted for its rhetorical gestures, sharp puns and interest in the materials of language itself—her self-described determination is “to follow every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam.” Describing her work in the Boston Review, poet and critic Richard Howard alleged that “most of McHugh’s poems end in a spurt, as they proceed in a slather, of just such astonishment as is bestowed—afforded—by . . .

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