Carmine Red
2022-03-06

***

March is Women's History
Month. Time to sit
down and reflect on all the shit
my ancestors went through
so that I could be
here today, collapsed in bed,
distressed,
wracked with anxiety,
in desperate need to be exhumed
from this disintegrating body.

I'm forgetting my own herstory.
Past entries in my journals
are becoming letters from foreign countries,
the other timelines where I am well,
doing well,
not at the bottom of a well.
The other timelines where I am making things
of worldwide importance,
where on my childhood detractors
I've gotten revenge.
Not wishing I was a bird
like those outside that now return
in preparation for spring.

It could have been so much worse.
Straitjacket, locked up, never heard
from again. Maybe lobotomized.
How many geniuses have met their demise
at the hands of a crude scalpel,
I wonder? And I, here,
how could I in this day or now convince
the padded-wall jailers
that the other soul that resides in me means well?
"She has dominion over 
every part of me,
but *noli timere*: I have no desire
to harm my family."
Who would lis-
ten, not lock me up for ten
days, weeks, months, years
until I renounced this world within me so dear?

Tell me, can you hear the screams
from behind
tied-
on masks plastered with smiles
for the crime
of omitting domestic servitude from one's dreams?
Can you feel on your hands the blood spilled
from God's unwanted "blessing" that might instead kill
when it comes to term, woman coming to terms
that the Son who bled with promise to save
won't give her better than wires with which to lacerate?

Can you see how bright is
the future we might have had
if every woman brilliance
was not snubbed out at every chance?

The sheer weight
is enough to make
anyone go insane.

I'm forgetting my own herstory.
It seems some days
that things have forever been this way,
each day bleeding into the next,
record on repeat.
The slightest bit of thawing heat
feels like a bitter attack:
how dare I be reminded that
this isn't all I've ever had.

How dare anything have the audacity to remind
that one day I won't anymore be able to hide.

There will come a day when the sky
breaks and lets in cleansing sunshine.
And I'll have to look my mother in the face.
And I'll have to tell her that when I die
I'm going to a completely different place
than Heaven or Hell.
I'm going to remember the hell
that the men of all history have inflicted
and make a new world where to be what I am
is not a sin, not gravely iniquitous.
And she'll have to confer with Father and decide
if what I've done
is grave enough
to warrant the psych ward's involuntary hold.

This is my birthright as a female, isn't it?
The padded room's blistering cold.

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander