Paper Matches by Paulette Jiles

Paulette Jiles is an American born Canadian poet and novelist who has won the Governor General's Award (Canada's highest literary honor) for a collection of her poems, as well as many prose awards both in Canada and in the United States. 

"Paper Matches"
My aunts washed dishes while the uncles
squirted each other on the lawn with
garden hoses. Why are we in here,
I said, and they are out there?
That’s the way it is,
said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one.
I have the rages that small animals have,
being small, being animal.
Written on me was a message,
“At Your Service,”
like a book of paper matches.
One by one we were taken out
and struck.
We come bearing supper,
our heads on fire.”

This poem at face value can be taken as a young girl at a family party, but on a deeper level this poem is saying much more. The speaker in the poem is not necessarily the author but instead is any young girl (probably age ten or a little older) who observes that she and her aunts "washed dishes while her uncles squirted each other on the lawn with garden hoses." The speaker is the one that continues the plot of this poem through her tone.  The tone in the first few lines is inquisitive and slightly naïve, and by using first and third person pronouns it makes the reader connect on a deeper level and begin to wonder about this question too. Gender roles are brought into consideration, which are always a universal problem. The tone in the poem then shifts when the speaker's Aunt Hetty, "The shriveled-up one" tells her that it is the way that it is. This enrages the speaker and the tone becomes angry and resentful. The young girl compares her situation to a book of paper matches that are used then disposed of without a second thought. She feels like all the women in her life have been taken advantage of and that there is nothing she or anyone else can do to change that. The final sentence of the one stanza poem makes up the strongest two lines. "We come bearing supper, our heads on fire." This creates a pictorial metaphor comparing the women to burning matches.