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.