Archives for March 2013

girl song I

 

Honey, I want to write you a letter, a tonic, a poem;

but I’m writing from my sick (and sharp) from the repeat

in my head of the words to cancel that get backing, that are

allowed to fly and shred inside.  I am not dead, my body

is tired, my brain limps, but the bullet was air, not metal,

larynx and air and lips that should be burnt not kissed.  Lips

that came out of a mama, to eat mamas and girls, to eat

the girls of mamas, the babies of girls.  How to tell when your

baby boy will grow up to try to wither girls like one you were.

My boys wouldn’t.  Those men come from stunted mamas,

from a putrid flower center, yellow fuzz a deceiving puddle

of gook like pine green slime off a rotting leaf, they slip

and contort in that decay-muck to grow, and they never had

a chance.  They come from mamas who would not want to

write a poem like this, who would never think it, too far gone

with head in a sack—like the vacuum with a human face that

threw a blanket over Eman al-Obeidy’s head in that Tripoli

hotel where she begged for better men to come forward, women

and men like herself, so in touch with her wound so as to feel it

too, their wound too, not one victim alone trying to meet eyes

to recognize, but many together wet eyes clicking, grimaced mouths

concatenating at the corners for unanimous, one-voiced wreaths,

to string the men who thrust and get hard cheering each other,

patting each other, whose eyes glitter, go wide as they watch

their cocks their buddies’ cocks grow to half-blown balloons

fittable in girl hands,  to carol round them and then shoot out

like supermen:  to cat’s-cradle their asses, a boa-mean snare.

 

I want for you a song that works, that does the bullet in reverse,

that rips open your chest for outpour of effulgence, that leaves

you in the shape of crucifixion, arms out, head back, back arched,

chest pouring wrists spearing radiance.  The light is a bridge to all

in need, the light is freedom, it is power,  not crimp.  My mind fights

now for light, not babe with walking cane crook a-yank on neck, not

live cow with widest eyes in a voodoo ring, its organs wrenched out

its slit belly one by one by throng who chant and who should never

have been born, who should not be, who should not be, not girl grown

to pimp’s satchel and given the space of a stall to live like her counter-

part the beautiful sow;   the pig is no kin of the pimp; the pimp’s mama

and brother are the snake and the devil, and no peaceable animal;

the mouse is king of the pimp, but it’s a secret, I tell now.  (That secret

rotates, abides, to just a little avail or none, since the time of the

long away cross that bore the king both begging and utterly given;

pain invited if no other way, to not be, defy the opposite.  Let me

not be what they are.  Let me be with even one taken for bauble

by the horned group that names cannot, in full, warn from, that

puts out names, bakes duct-taped-carapaced dogs in ovens, cackles

at a whipping: the more so with pleas to stop, direct address, a try

to reach in  There is nothing in: an inversion, the hurt that made

it forgotten, cannot be pulled up from primal chest by voice eyes

of Wiesel’s hanging child writhing in a slack noose in a Nazi camp.)

 

god if I could get that face that vomited words crazy bitch slut ugly

crazy, when I said stop, don’t look that way at my body, my body

is mine, and I am more than what you want to see, I am more than

what you have in you, than anybody who had a part in your making

has in them; anyone connected with a one like you is a failure: if they

condone, if they don’t see you like this, hand in hand with men-friends,

shouting down a girl who says I am more, my body is not cheap, my

body is all, it is sewn to the root of me, it is my transit to all good,

so I will keep it clean of your stares, that do not ask, that do not

offer, that flat-foot slap over, boot-kick,  of blind eyes that stamp;

you think this is an auction, but I am free.

 

I want a song for you, baby girl, valiant, to not be taken out of

yourself for days because of men who do not take no who spit acid

at your cheek and eyes and the whole armature that does not help,

that does nothing for you but secretly like your place wish it stay,

as they imagine their separation from you with their teacup transplant-

vision, why they make your body fetish: the frantic flit of not being able

to see past theirs; or if women, who cower under one of the he who

gloats, practice clandestinely before the mirror his particular posture,

grin at girls panicking as they pull out the dagger the pen from above

an areola, joy over and count on their distinct, removed place, and do

everything, do nothing, to keep things as they are.

 

I know the injustice, of knowing your worth, and not having it

sung back to you.  That you know is miracle; you had something

in you, you had an ingenuousness that was so diamond it could

not be flipped; you could see before the fight found you.  Purity

is a clear view, it will not be coopted,  sold, made murky.  It is

sooner the clown in its insistence, calling ruptures, tortures

graces: back not turned on truth of what it was to be at worst.

 

Oh honey, what there is to put up with.  They do not believe

you when you tell.  They deny it even if they know.  I know.

I am with you and wish for you, if it comes to this, a separate

peace within, if they keep it from you in this world, if they never

permit breach,  if you are too rare for many allies, if what is

common is the mob.  They cannot read what swamps them.

You are desperate for more versed.

 

Honey, like you I still learn, my brain is tired now, I’ve been

walloped, I’ve been sloshing in the mindless and the cruel, and

I’m better than that, we are.  Our humility has to budge there;

if it doesn’t, we may end up dark in a sack, following:  stooping

to engage, for the rumble crouching, going blue (as air holes

shrunken to tea stirs: rhinoplastic sickle nostrils, or worse, no

mouth, holes poked into the scaley mask of an acid attack hecatomb

(to god of ego and mama I want now with shit in the diaper) (with

progress of time, new ingenuities!), when the flesh has melted to

one fused article, from a coffee cup filled with hell potion lunged

in midday), when even looking at them mars, when more nutritive

atmosphere is needed for you to gust the beauty you were meant to.

We may leave the girl we are alone, behind, go off with the pimp and

the not-woman-not-human in the Tripoli hotel who tried to hide

Eman.  They cannot be talked to sometimes, there is nothing there

behind the human face.  Or we may get too sad, forget each other.

 

Lamb, your pleasure is holy.  Your pleasure does not siphon

another, it links legs and foreheads touch, and the other can

keep the breath in the body, does not get a mouth glutted

with shame to swallow down pride like swill of blood.

 

I love you.  When you flash back to that evil and fog, or mind

as tacky gum, from which crystal can’t be culled (dumb is rent

from innocent,  from paramount as is, when the will to win

a pretend war rather than sun next to, is present; and even evil

that calculates, grips scant sliver of what there is to know, of

what is topmost to know)  looking on you singing your name

as curses, when air still feels material as sure as a true princess

feels the pea many stories down, gets dizzy from rotation of the

Earth, when you still haven’t mustered the pride to put the pimp

in his place—no  the clarity—put your human, caution, quality

aside now—with them it is wasted,  there is nothing there to coddle,

nothing to respect, a lifetime of this,  on turntable’s spindle-snag

repeat, and of knowing self, what you are to the names they hail,

teaches class bumped by heads of those.  Many would take this

from you, they would jump to:  cynical wisdom is unknown to her;

but your love is not the put-on that gang’s is, for show, to a few,

by obligation (-love to sister, for she is not picked whore or ‘crazy

bitch’, bedlam grand marshal with broom for baton: she is called

family, rather, so a bar on choosing her,  to lynch, to name, to hang

with placard), while really love only to their claim to take what is not

for them  and to those who cheer their looting and spite-smashing;

I know the difference between your much and their flint.  I am

embracing you while your body shivers to recover.  I would snap you

back to center in an instant if I could (out scandal drone of salt wound

words, or circling trolls in walls of head- the buck tooth of their aiming

eyes, Goofy dog guffaw, but devils;  even suited, slick, the anus scrape,

the wrong they are and portrait-pride in it).  You are more.  You are

the better.  Truth  (is a living word, its guarantor loss and unearned

hurt with eyes wide open)  clings to your leg, hides behind your knee.

I see you,  I know.

This poem is  by Lianuska Gutierrez, a Ph.D. candidate in English and Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Everyday Sexism Project is following up on their successful #ShoutingBack tweet chat and Twitter thread about street harassment by hosting a chat specifically about strangers who follow you in public spaces. So if you’ve ever been #followed by a stranger in a public space, tweet it now for the @EverydaySexism tweetchat. Use #followed.

The pads of her fingers rapping each other remind me

the vibratory speed of hummingbird wings—

way to move at once integral

and supranatural,  like endowments

of an avatar, or the gamer himself

boosted by his digital man, the human made

bigger, quicker; but here, I make the magnify

by my looking, by her aureole of tension, the blur

in air I see of speedy movement on repeat.

Unable to stop, palm bases also pressing,

making a crèche of her hands, neat nails

glancing light.  Pumps, nude hose, minutely pleated

silk skirt an inverted cupcake paper waisting her,

ruffled bib on her blouse flamboyant as an extrusion

of innards:  to look smart perforce, as a bumper,  as a beg,

because she has the chaotic bones of the King of Pop’s

purported saint,  the Elephant Man,

who was made to declaim savagery

run up against a metro station wall.

 

She knows she is not safe here, words like a miasma,

sewer coat, a wet stench to cling and sink in skin,

or daggers—maybe the tool that bursts into

your belly to flower, the instantaneous claws-out of

many whetted blades to jerk this way and that

like a clockwork clothes-clean spinner.  This is underground,

this is city, and it is free-for-all; there is no one to prosecute

what cannot be seen, easiest to stomp because taken

as not real, or that pretend brandished  hid behind

with smirks and glowing red taloned fingers

hardest to repair, to put back,

a flattened animal on the road.

This is where I once heard a girl

tell a toilet-mouthed man, lofting his profanities

for all the subway car to hear,  to hush,

and this spurt of energy thinks it can weather the kind

she has taken aim at, enough! and adrenaline make brave,

so the fed up teen did not anticipate that her body

would be turned inside out and puked in

as strangers made stony, as one listener

an old man, cachinnated como cochino, with stage or

bedlam abandon,   circus ring-master (the tiger tamer

who made Carter’s little Lizzie[1] in a frock  hold him) or drunk

(perverted, mean, not merry).

Your pussy your pussy

this word a rib wrenched from her side turned bludgeon,

something of her made other and fangs

the stench of it, you need Clorox to get rid of that stench

You see, he had to show her his truth, the lie that she is down

to him, her prissiness no divide, she is as dirty and gone,

he had to prove that there cannot be people in the world

unlike he is: he cannot be an aborted one:  he is All

there is to be,   all only house ugly.

And she talked back, in it now, she had to,

but he was louder, and he had her womanhood

spreadeagled over the ads, like the skinned

man hoisted in Silence of the Lambs, in a way

that she could not pin him.

She could not gather allies at a drop

like he always can.  Someone cackled

in the throng.

 

My face has also been called names (so that I let it be cut,

when I was without foothold), like Ms. Hummingbird’s.

I remember, after the cut, in a downpour, my hair short then, and so,

un-feminine, and too, not sleek  in rain, the eyes of one came on me;

the other was turned away.  The first to his mate:

Turn around, with an encouraging glint in his eye,

I’ve got your X-mas present here.

The other did as told, and Awww man, you tricked me! 

They laugh, and when they see I know (I am, after all, there):

Excuse me, with mock gallantry, sedate nod, as they sidestep me,

as if to say: We know the part, and we are not that.  But

we can strut it if you tell.  We can play human, and they

will not be able to tell you and us apart.  No scratch on you,

no bloody seam to sing our dig.

So you best hush now.

 

The girl on the platform taps her hands together,

steeples that join and dismember in a flash over

and over.  I watch my sister, she keeps at it

as she enters the subway car, as she is sitting.

She needs something to do out here in public, exposed,

alone, no gallant defender by her side.

And maybe if she looks already invaded,

she won’t find any   who’ll want to pick up that slack.