The Champagne Soapbox

  • food

    I heard someone chew in the dark.

    At the movies – the one with the food –

    just me, them, someone else,

    all of us lit by a horror film.

    Their chewing pressed on one edge of me,

    like something might happen

    if they didn’t stop.

    I wished I could unhear them.

    I wondered what I sound like

    when my spit surrounds the elements,

    consuming in full.

    I imagined the slop they dropped,

    melting onto their shirt in the dark,

    their fork interrupting

    the quiet spaces between dialogue.

    Some part of me thought

    their mechanisms were communicating

    that they didn’t care for mine.

    Maybe I care too much –

    for mine, for theirs,

    for everything that stays inside

    the hand-drawn lines.

    Between open space of natural fullness.

    I bought salad dressing.

    Wanted to make it myself

    but couldn’t afford

    the anchovies or the effort

    the smashing of tinned fish into raw.

    Twisted the cap and it’s expired.

    Still poured it over random greens,

    ate the shelf-rotted food,

    drank from a glass with a straw,

    numbed myself with noise,

    listened to my own chewing

    in the small.

    Everything’s starting to feel gross.

    She had a tattoo that my boyfriend has.

    My smile made that baby dance.

    I feel stuck between my friends –

    I convince myself I’m moving through them,

    with them. And I am. I’m just overthinking.

    I heard someone chew.

    We cycle through people and things,

    digest what isn’t new

    but still meant for us.

    It feels like home to feel

    like I belong to nothing

    and everything.

    To sway between overanalyzing my body

    and noticing my face while I do it.

    To watch the way they look at me

    when I stir up some drama

    that’s nothing new.

    A worn-out plane seat.

    Stuffing luggage with what my paycheck can do.

    Maybe I’m not stuck.

    Maybe I’m just through.

    I keep forgetting my to-dos.

    Write them down, stare at them

    until my desires rot gray.

    My wants turn to goals;

    everything to do

    Suburbia feels the same as it used to.

    Park my dad’s bike, sway a fight

    Air feels a bit different, 

    each wind slap like my first bite. 

    Friction leads to creation or whatever.

    The increased normalcy.

    Submission to chaos, debt, a functional fallacy.

    The notes in my bedside drawer

    lists of things for other people

    I make lists for myself now too,

    that’s something new. 

  • sunset boulevard

    I don’t know why I’m frightened. I know my way around here – the cardboard trees, finger painted seas, the aforementioned enlightening and storms of overdosed pleas.

    The early morning slurry and late evening scares. I’ve spent dawns trying to ignore fantasy and dusks painting new realities. Reassuring myself with touching toes and successful stranger conversations. I’m coming home to stability wanting to stretch to feel my silenced being.

    This world has waited long enough, it begs me to come home and break my thirsting fast. Can I stop my hand from shaking? Can I run away and expect my things to stay? Maybe they watch over my things expecting me to return with new things, tools or bangs. 

    Women who run like the wolves and stretch their chest to escape moonlight tides or banging tools. I’ve felt eaten by emotion, magic in the making, a life I’ve dreamed of creating. Has there ever been a moment when I stopped thinking of goodbye?

    Maybe now it will be as if I never knew goodbye.  The handshake can be firm. The familiar blue of the sea found in similar hue of our morning sky. My legs can cross without feeling constricting,

    My arms can hold without convincing, my eyes can speak things without stating meaning. 

    You can me fly without any fear of my weight failing, watch me cry without fear of my joy weaning, watch me fall and cry and snort and laugh. Maybe succumbing is just practice for numbing that running feeling. 

    I’ve tried to look beyond the clouds, up and down, and all I’ve learned is that I don’t know clouds at all. I’ve rushed love, when tough or neatly bound, and all I’ve learned is that I don’t know love in it’s all.

    I will buy the nice blender just to continue twisting our tongues and words together. I will work the mean thoughts apart just to buy more time forever. 

    Help me! There’s no comprehending just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get;

    And still feel so alone in this generational class,

    And still feel related in past life.

    I’m not a hit and run driver. I’m not sure of being hit by red lights, running past green lights and feeling safe in the driver seat.

    Help – I held the deer right in its conscious lights, detected its emotion, its nativity reminding me of you. Maybe you should drive, I’ll be the deer. Be totally smacked with love by you, picked up by you, taken care by you. I can tell stories of how I could run, it the disillusion of finger paintings and crafts.

  • crinkle toes

    My little trinkets and toys. We have a birthday and your wedding and some babies. We share the attention we once yearned for, until it reaches overseas. Until the fat man sings about how unlucky stardust could be sand for another rich man’s feet. Can mankind be resolved of egocentric immaturity? The gift of witness is protective from decomposition’s mystery.

    Stop motion claymations in rouge and puckered smiles. I put my fingers between the layers of tulle and scratch them together. Clacking wood toes on the ground, staring out at the staircase with eager eyes to blue eyeshadow and tights. Yellow chalk to grind the tops of your nails on. 

    I’ve tried not to outgrow the colors of my youth. 

    My closet looks like beige mush. 

    I’ve slicked back my hair so long that the edges don’t return. My cat and I shed the same out of hair. I shed so much hair and nails and emotion. The things I do and watch and endure for the betterment of soul. Eager to yearn betterment when all I’ve learned is earned. 

    Our cars become sunburned and healed. Peel at the skin of my lips and press rouge into my toughened maturity. Homogenized mush will be mushed so much that my moisture will wicker and my throat will produce the familiar booming laughter. An echo for, and my siren noise to call them back again.

    Holy love water soaking up the flick of your youth’s cigarette in spite of your purity. The candle hints over between the wall and I, white mush. Stickers in the grass, in between toes, pick apart by fingers and found in my hair. Just put on my jacket if you want the hug. Give it back to me when you’re done. 

  • baby eyeshadow

    Sometimes I feel like that dog in a window, waiting to see you pass by. Jumping at the key turn, time resuming and forgoing her whining cry. My car is quiet during normal procedures, echoing the constant funeral procession of sniffling quiet. Ruminating engine and the same car. I come home to dead flowers and dusted poems with words. I take care of things with time. Stationary with my birthday, and words. 

    Red like roses or lipstick or wine and passion and flats, sweaters or brake lights and swollen eyes. Blue like boys and baby eyeshadow and beer or screens or quietness, crystals and sea foam, my recurring round-trips to Detroit. You say I’m like the ice I freeze. Chewing the red skin of my lips with my teeth either an oral fixation or immaturity. My cold stare and your radiation. Words and writing, all so quiet. Purple hickeys from who knows, I know. Well-ish. 

    Drink you spilled all over the seat. There’s a stain on my pants, so I wash it clean. Their face falling asleep becoming resolve of day anxiety. I watched their cheeks react to the pillow gravity. I think we’re like fire and water. Signs. You’re burning up, I’m cooling down. Constantly down and filled up. She’ll wake me up, he’ll wake me up. Cherry rouge and big water gulp. 

  • soft animal

    I’ve been trying to write a poem like a tattoo. Ink on a pen. Underneath the skin. Except now it comes up my throat. I say words I could’ve never wrote because ink is forever and I shake stutter when I give speeches. Becoming more of a bitch lately. Young, fresh smelling leather. There’s a lot of empty space. And, I contemplate the difference in a circle and a hole. A lasso before it catches the animal, and what it looks like around something another something needed. 

    Needles, guns, grass. 

    Some important song.

    And, most of my words will pass. 

    The ones not written by tongue.

    My arthritic hands flip hymns from mass. 

    To do and not to say. 

    Slurring laughter with a meaningless hum. 

    Wake up asleep, just another day. 

    Believe the foggy lullaby that shares the tune of my future hand’s shakiness. The surrealist is opening his eyes. How can you be nostalgic for things your mind made up? Feel the eternity lineage women making up your fingerprints? Pushing each other for a chance to catch the light of your reflection. No phones until Friday, far from parents or road toll. A broken fresh individuality in independence, staring into the mirror for years picturing wire steel hairs red nails cigarettes accents curves like the ones you grew into. They thought of you, never knew you, “couldn’t be you” they moan and release between scrunching dirt between motionless toes. 

    That’s what they all say. The soft animal of our bodies when they become stray.

    I’m doing the same shit another day. The same shit stomping mommy come feed me again. Daddy I miss you again. Do you think of my voice when you want to be needed again? My room is red at night. I didn’t bite. My tongue is numb from cutting my teeth throughout the night. I’m doing the same shit yelling mommy don’t look at me again. Daddy do you see me? A sister is here and we love to play pretend. She lives alone now, we both do. Mend the urges while his forgiveness is true. Pray that when you get caught, the folds in your forehead wrinkles are warm and eyes you look into still seafoam.

  • stomach box

    Smell the dust of what I left. Lay my head. Recite echos of old insane melting the dark crevices of flesh brain. Pick apart the same ending from dead meaning. Same meaning to the dead end. Melting rain and embrace your never-end always going.

    Pre-meditated rehearsals of competency and my cat is scratching the gray walls like he’s found the princess blue beneath, the mint that once woken me. Stare into the lighter part of shadows and expect figures to come running after me.

    Find that under layers of paint, I’m made of projections. About thirty percent of those are white-gripped etchings of shit pre-teen poetry I wrote not expecting to be seen, except by my mother. 

    I could’ve been just thirteen. 

    Maybe twelve. 

    Smash my feet between the recycled mattress and painted yellow pine.

    In another world, I’m my own daughter. I don’t even recognize her. If I were her, I wouldn’t be me. Maybe similar tragedies. Sparkles and hurricanes. Smoke weed because it pisses his mom off but it’s fine now. We learned better. Punch the door behind me, when he was looking at me, still a few inches shorter than me. Still young, like now. Flapping hair slapping on the window, creased ponytail on the come down. Minor drunkenness, not the kind I learned. My sister cried because she didn’t recognize me. I test the drywall, and ask how to cry again?

    To be soft and defined again?

    You cracked your lips just to feel alone again?

    Tarnish my memory with provocativeness. More makeup, a push-up and a sports and a pinch and a cinch. Bounce and move, tumble and run. Gossip and text and smack, they’re having sex. Distaste for lunch. The mirror looks different. Streaking away from headlights on an abandoned road, dark of course. Secret footage, of course. There’s an innate swollen energy, a foreign body chewing on my inside. I ran, because it’s not the kind that’s learned. We kind of just do. I wear silver.

    I don’t know what to do with my hands anymore. My feet feel too free. Wiggled toes to find a grip on the leather curved seat. See my digits and their stick on the dashboard glass plastic. Comfort is temporary, it’s all overcoming. Eat it to release.

    I want to change. I want to grow. It’s impossible not to question what I know, the things I want but never fully get, seek attention until it’s critical. I lose myself and find her when I finally let ego go. A different sort of glow coming from the shadows when hiding below.

    What if it was all my fault?

    What if I drove you to it?

    I’m guilty, aren’t you?

    I look so much like my mother. 

    I absorb people’s hardness. I wake up greasy. I’m not nice to myself, the plush femininity my soul finds easy to give to mouths with rotten breath. The smoothness of innocence, all that I have learned and figuring out what’s left. I forget to breathe when I run. It’s never been this easy before.

    Grind my mouth bones for hours, swallowing their dust. Gather the dust and fold them into a pretty stomach box.

  • sure

    Sure, I have time. I always have time for you. Sure, whatever you need. Whatever you need. 

    What do you need? Should I pack extra in case you don’t bring what you need? It’s hard for me to grasp I’m all you need. My smile you found between carnivorous testosterone and chemical weed. The inside of my gnawed lips slide against rugged teeth, the ones marked between not eating clean and biting nails. When my smile feels weak. What parts of my mind can you only see?

    I can be what you need. Sure, I become someone better for you to perceive. Not that you need it, that’s not what I mean. Give you a chance to rediscover between the necessary medicinal estrogen and books I ordered but never read. Patti Smith on my Night Stand with a rusting earmark between written crises and chicken-scratch on Ch. 13. I told you I wanted to disappear when I didn’t feel seen.

    Your smile fits into my neck, like, so many liquids filling cracks between ice and mixed hormones and screaming men at the ringing bar scene. I’m shorter than everyone else. How I absorb energy. How tall I grow to reach above beaten ego and pseudo-personality. How I felt, and become someone else. He always sees.

    Remind me of how to be. Sure, whatever I need. Let’s melt into REM pheromones and recite scenes my premature dreams begged me to complete. We start a movie and fall asleep.

    I look at clouds from both sides now. Up and down, cloudy visions I that vaguely recall. It hasn’t rained much at all this fall. The more I think, I don’t really know clouds at all. 

    Junebugs and mosquitoes and flies my cat chase. The dizzy dancing way that we feel when dreams become real. First time seeing snow as if it were on a beach. It disappears like an empty plate after a big meal. I forgot how skinny felt.

    Happy tears but looking around slows them down. I smile and frown, seconds between the same emotion, a different clown. I turned 25 wearing a princess crown. An easy rhyme to find what was never around, when I was little, when I was 13. Sneaking words and stuffing them between the mattress and sheets. I wrote to her while meeting the future, acting like the future was mine to predict when I still sat with crossed feet. I still do.

    Now friends are acting strange. They shake their head and mention that I changed. Look around and believe everything isn’t the same. Clouds in the way, releasing the rare rain. I’m always in the way, releasing words that all mean the same. Just like now, you reading this. Sure, whatever I need to make my thoughts feel less than insane. Felt the rain split my skin and they wonder how my brain translates simple pleasure with grain. 

    It’s just a day, and the next. 

    I won’t always feel the best. 

    Be your best. My best.

    2AM, learning how to invest. 

    Use the airport to leave and come home. 

    Live by the airport, watch the people leave and make it home.

    Hope that the pilot gets some rest. 

  • duck pond

    The sweet in-between. My ghost succumbs the spiritual machine that supports both forward time and the traveling me. Life is losing the idealized time only to find a newer sense of keeping a winning score. It evens out, in-between the end and what’s more.

    Nothing’s gonna change my world.

    Nothing’s gonna change my world.

    Thoughts meander like restless wind inside a letterbox. They tumble blindly and collapse into each other still moving in-out-through chewy idea noodles, store bought sauce.

    Dried grass and tangled hair, both doors for the universal exhale. I turned the single-ply page and found greasy fingerprints through the thick layer of dust. I wake up falling asleep to his yesterday musk. Count his moles until the clouds wither and gently reveal dusk.

    I notice myself more when I’m just a person on a crowded street. Strangers behind tree trunks with prowling curiosity toward the beat of my slapping feet. Most of the time, it was time that I spent just thinking about me. Across the universe, there is an angel willing to live and die again to feel the hungry breath the mammals eat.

    There’s a man talking to himself on the street. He has clothes on and his haircut is clean. He passes by strangers that ask him for his food while he clocks his dry-cleaned-and-ironed pant crease. Most of the time, not all the time, a strict allotment of time is spent thinking about what other people perceive. Maybe because I do. All I do is think.

    Say thank you when the plate is balanced, when the fork scrapes the front of my teeth, when you’re aware of the flowers splitting the awkward space between you and me. The tasteless remain sit in the crack of the bones that want to be seen. I pick at the liminal noise, with my bitten nails, and wonder what other things you don’t want to tell me. Idleness directs sincerity, homemade sauce and dirty teeth.

    Something’s gonna change my world.

    Something’s gonna change my world.

    There’s a distant sound of a gun. A silvering son flipped the gold-rimmed eulogy pages. Careful handwriting, stone engraving. He would tell me stories about Alice jumping into the well. I want to fall asleep in the rain, just once, to see which (if any) part of me will rust. My steps are melting into the ground, and I wonder if this is the only way my words won’t wither and become rotten from worms and dust.

    I’m running and my eyes start to burn from sweat. I don’t run, I’m not the best. Pick at the eyelashes until the rooster had his sung his song from the chest. Not yet. I keep a jar of flies and watch the starven-one allow the full-one drain itself to death. I try to not be morbid, but my life is complete and I’m desperate to maintain the youthful mortality until my final unrelenting breath.

    A freckle on my foot, my neck. Between my chin and my lips, adjacent from my cheek. Someone missed. Ghostly lips once pressed, which is weird to think about the body I have and the bodies before who made my hair brown, eyes dark, and freckles blessed. Strange woman looking at herself undressed, impressed with how metamorphic love lingers. Greet the angels just to have them point out their past. So many mortal ones walk right past. I don’t notice.

    My aunt told me freckles were kisses from sun. I’ll look directly at the sky if it meant that my hazy fate is grossly polluted with passion. Sat there in a fluorescent bikini looking at the sky. I’ve practiced so much that I can float above the floor with glowing poise, allowing the world’s exhale push me into strangers on the street.

    Somebody’s gonna change my world.

    Somebody’s gonna change my world.

    Leather scars. I drive my car to the pond. Stare out into the dark, write words that might matter, probably not. Contemplate the marks my children might have and stain fresh paper with my depleting stardust. Throw thoughts into the letterbox. Allow them to purify while they tumble around, dodging strangers and allowing him to catch one (and read it) with his blood-blistered fingers.

  • laundry

    Southerners know the smell of rain like the cedar they splinted with a kindergarten foot. My bedroom drywall that I crushed in my teens. Between my white four corners, I found a perching window for my bent legs to find held. When I jump, I crash through the branches just to land among the roots of my childhood backyard tree.

    In the way the morning sky reflects on water, I lay amongst my disposition to find the moon highlights my smile. Darkness surrounds me; light always finds me. When it rains, her smile captures the tears from the sky. She swallows them whole and her pores melt away heaven’s pollution in the clear, green mass. One day, I will become the soil; reflect the darkness of the old splintered cedar and heirloom my brightness to the remaining. So many elements in this world for us to experience and then set free.

    I’d pick a story to picture for myself at night, most of the time manifesting an adulthood of living alright. Going to the grocery store or putting off dirty laundry while my REM eyes roll in circles left to right. My hair sprawled between four pillows, never comfortable enough to complete the holes in the tight fibers making up my cheap sheets. Staring at the ceiling fan, hoping it falls down for a story about overcoming the maybes from a might. I pictured this life so much that living now is sleeping between silent daydreams and being awake for most the night.

    I want to lay in the warm rain to watch the nightmarish shadows thin to an equal gray. Now that I’m older, I can turn her blemished, teenage chin to the other shoulder. Still laying amongst southeast trees, I found years later that the grass where I laid left a bed in your shape. I now wake up in my mass of pillows wondering why my dreams are better when I’m awake, staring through your eyes deciphering your cultivating grace.

    My bedroom was a bunch of colors. They started as yellow, and now they’re gray. I moved into this new place where the walls are white. Encountering people who grew up on different advice, the boys who aren’t nice. My dad hated recitals but loved when my front-middle spot was in the light. The addictive nostalgia I find in center-stage, looking for my dad in the priority seating but totally out of my sight. I picked people beyond the spotlight, waiting in the shadows to lure me with monochrome flowers and an after-show soliloquy fight. I love my dad, men who provide soft rain turning into sunlight.

    Sometimes I’m convinced that he waits for the sun to rise just so he could hand it to me. I could wrap my arms around the warmth and melt in the staring sweetness, completing the holes between his sheet fibers. It’s easy to become dizzy from his brightness, even his silver chain flickers in the darkness. His grace keeps me from fighting gravity; I find myself floating towards him closer than my allowing physicality. My dirty shirt smells like cologne and his kindness and my spirituality. I find this to be the easiest difficulty: allowing myself a life full of emotional luxury. I whispered a sweet nothing from across the room while he was already smiling at me.

    As much as he is the sunshine, I crave the rain. Jumping in oceans just to find his fingers already reaching for my waist. I sense my younger self wanting to drink his pouring love until my drunken teenage addictions wane. I wish summer could end sooner just so I could admire the breath he sighs in full winter clarity. I found that my love grows among the roots of the tree in the place where it never snows. He whispers sweet nothing in his sleep, and I get sleepy goosebumps from the glow of his sincerity. His empty cup sits next to the one completely filled. I fell asleep, so I spill mine to make his half empty. Our parent’s advice stem from neighboring trees.

    Emotions reveal themselves to us in the way devoted artists place their destiny’s work against a glass picture frame. I’ll sit to watch his video game, comment things just to hear how his laugh sounds when I hide myself behind a provocative screen name. All of my dreams are movies that he has already seen. We argue about what we’re going to wear on Halloween. I know I’m in Heaven, because hands make Hell seem cold and life alone seem Purgatory. Hell froze over in the three days I spent away. I drifted through people getting off the plane just so my world can begin again after the cold delay. There’s a piece of me melted on the left side of his neck, and I smelled his cologne and his kindness and whispered sweet nothings like ‘i wrote so much; this is the best day.’

    I’ve lost so many free days to simple growing pains; time has become a delicacy. My body is older and alcohol is poison and balancing emotions becomes my winning game and legacy. My aching feet are a sign of a relentless spirit – well, I fell in the parking garage doing a one-handed cartwheel. I tell time to slow down while I stand to watch the ticker match twelve. I mark my calendar by the days where time stood still, and by the sunrises spent looking out from someone else’s, his, windowsill.

    In the staring whiteness, I assume these past emotions as something to let free. Accepting my boyish treat in this world as a treaty from the universe regarding the girl who once laid on the ground burning her eyes, wondering when her time will be. I wonder about the last time we existed as just friends, now whispering sweet nothing in between sweet everything for everyone to notice and believe. When I jump and allow life to be, I hope to fall through the branches in southeast trees. Always only a few minutes away from me: in a house, by a car, pull me away from the inside of the street, in the apartment a block away from 24th Street. Two planets maintaining magnetizing gravity, illuminating each other in shared brightness for all darkness to see.

  • pigs and parrots

    My soul song is a parroted reprise. The ballad of bachelors is a scream of evolutionary thoughts demoralized by agency and enterprise.

    Women can look through masculine eyes and hear concise images of the words they think. Nuns looked into my wide eyes and claimed my female agency was a gift for my husband to keep.

    I prayed to the son for my soul to keep, for the chance that I passed in my sleep, I was deserted far from critical sins to reap. I pray that my daughters come to know their god outside acts of senseless violence or starvation from ignorance of urges they are guilty to feed.

    A red gift ribbon stains my neck pink, begging to be unwrapped just so I can breathe. Men use their privileged hands because I have torn my nail-bed rough by sharpened jagged teeth.

    Our suffocating is relieved by people who notice and become distracted by the sparkle in our cellophane. Maybe one day pleasure will not remind me of pain.

    Bubble Bath and Funny Bunny blend together to make a soft pink. Things are always happening so my behavior is to just do without contemplating thoughts I think.

    Melting in a sinking chair discussing the thoughts that I think with a shrink with a similar degree. What makes her so better than me, that she has the agency to tell me what my thoughts seem and ask me to let them be free?

    A woman who once thought these thoughts were part of being woman and not being weak. Maybe they are not thoughts, but just intrusions that force themselves to be known for my survival. Maybe we are not just women but evolutionary connections that sing the parroted reprisal.

    Water drips from the corner of his mouth like a carnivore. I tell him that I grew up on meat and cajun seasoning and men who look at me like meat. He liked the way my femininity maintains tender but masks indication of being weak. He smell the testosterone in my body when I defend myself sharply of the words that I speak. I never considered myself tough, but I make it difficult for him to tear me apart and game tastes good when the hunt is difficult to please.

    We make the mistake of excusing pleasure as notion for potential peace.

    A lot of men just want a boyfriend who has boobs, a competing masculinity. A cavity as a treat, from a treat. My feminine sweetness is a surprise after sleeping in shower water and waking up to dry deceit. Mistreatment is a condition of my inability to detect the ground beneath my painted feet. It was my fault, anyway, always. Women burned at the stake years after those very prayers were made.

    For a life deserving of pleasure, a woman must restructure the idea of experiencing defeat. Silently, we must lose so many times in order to find ourselves otherwise lost but complete.

    My baby curls faced mobile stars, dreaming of earning autonomy through just a few more years. Even that young, I understood that earning autonomy would be some man’s greatest fear. My tithe reduces with every independent year.

    The more woman I become, the less ownership I have of the total sum; I tear through cellophane daily to compete with men about my percentage of the piece they take from you and me. 24-years old and I still use my teeth to rip the nail-bed away, partially clean but rough enough to repair next week. I have money to get my nails done in blend of different pinks.

    Sharpen my sword to build a repertoire of weaponry to compete with exploitative masculinity. My first therapist knew what I meant when I told her that my boyfriend stole my femininity.

    This guy just mentioned that the pattern of my sheets are interesting. He talked about my sheets like they were part of me, though only part of the time I spend in them sleeping. That when he pictures me, I’m wrapped in layers of cotton. An object wrapped in layers of linen or cotton or cellophane or ribbon. Look in his mind and find my bed before you find me.

    A deer hanging by butcher’s twine, in a field otherwise utilized for nothing other than climaxing pleasurable satisfaction to their hunger.

    I tell my dad casually about my fear of men I have yet to meet, men I have met, men that treat me like meat. He tells me men are pigs who squeal at the sight of someone curly and something pink. Having two girls meant a lifetime of protecting them from sexual profanity. Bound to suffering eternal through sins of our previous fathers, committed long before their conception though haunted for eternity.

    I see him in the men I trust, who rebuild my idea of agency and challenge the boys who see my body as a vehicle for achieving egomaniacal prosperity.

    I picture myself laying soundly with their salt tears falling from the gravity I never could meet. Not one neuron signaling to swish my painted toes to a masculine beat.

    For once I won’t have a thought to think, only that I’m free from their thoughts. My shallow breath a sigh of relief when death is finally complete.

    Allow breeze to be a notion of my gentle grief for our stolen agency and bodies known as just meat. Let my children notice my femininity as a weapon that tenderizes meat, that modern man can’t accept defeat and one day a man will come around to feel sensitive by my feminine beat.

    The battle cry echoes a reprise of the women before me. Through hanging ribbons, I hear a suffocated plea for their forgiveness in freedom of speech. If it’s meant to be, then it will be. That I find so many living deaths in this life that each rebirth is a reminder that I actually am free.