poem: crying after a fight with my mother, twenty-twenty

in the autumn far-awayi read a portrait of the artist as a young manunder the trees, under the universityand i was notthe drama, the failure. waitingoutside the daycare, an after-somethingjob for the boring, earbuds and trite tragicmusic wrapped around my skull. i stayed very latein cafes, no-whip-cafe-mochaand scholarship questions, dreaminghopelessly and i — droppedthe history…

poem: stay-at-home woman

do you remember the red telephone, sitting like a silent cat, renovating the hall with its small plastic face? i watched you leave, the first day, and then i called my mother. the baby was twisting like an almond, a sliver in my ocean-split stomach; i put my hands over my mouth so she wouldn’t…

poem: the unexpected boy, the girl rewriting her ghosts

I do not believe men speak to smart women as women. They talk to us as men, as nameless faceless hommes d'affairs: we are leaning against the conference desk, in a (power) suit, with pin-tacks in our neck and the unfortunate addition of long hair, breasts, adultery. The young adult novels lied: there is nothing…

poem: la femme n’est pas politique

the persephone concepts, pt. 1 Persephone voted for a fascist; they killed her in the street. later, it came out that the fascist was a woman. they resurrected Persephone, gave her a medal, ripped open her vagina and sold her blood in jars.

poem: those people are like art, dead but beautiful

little girl, in the red skirt, in the impressionist painting outside my window: the sky is thick with cocoa beans, the clouds are wild.   her mother picks at the flower-dust in her hair. they have halos, they are goddesses spun out in starry nights, relics from when the world was young and girls waited…

poem: what is a woman?

when we were talking, he treated me entirely different from last year, he looked in my eyes and said, "i believe--and i'm sure you do too--", already giving me credit for having the right opinions, the right ideologies; this un-pretty girl who can talk of post-modernism, intersectionality and all the necessary college-activist ideals. but i…

poem: this will probably offend you (i’m not sorry)

i would be brilliant at being victorian, even as i would hate it but at least then the war cries of women (western, privileged women) would make sense. as it is, i am the artist looking stupidly (they say) to the wrong political direction and for me life comes before a maligned humanist choice. new…

poem: dear 2018

shall i tell you of my womanhood and the unpopular things that leave me sitting alone at parties, the 1960's splashed angrily in my face, and my hands now wet with mascara tears. but i am still not going to graduate school and i still don't want my entire life boxed into a career. i…