My outrage and the performative cruelty I exert from pain are different things,
sometimes together,
but not always.
Honoring my outrage is liberation.
Indulging the performance perpetuates collective bondage where I’m the only certain suffering.
Promises I’m keeping
I don’t want to fear my body
No matter what it looks like.
I don’t want to wish this vessel into anything else.
I don’t want to live outside of my life.
For the rest of my days, I am an insider when it comes to my joy,
and pleasure, and every sensation from the outside or howl from within,
This body isn’t an improvement project.
It’s soft and textured terrain don’t have to meet any market value.
I want to love the way my life feels over any idea on how I or it looks. And I’m done judging myself for it, even if I don’t always get it either.
How do I get back to that?
I hear happy in other peoples’ voices, and I feel homesick.
Life support
Sometimes, my inhales sound like the names of everyone who has saved my life.
The integrated chain of oxygen inward and co2 out isn’t broken because someone stepped in when I tried to split it in half—
When I wanted to make my body a strand of co2,
they grabbed on to my body before it became air.
Days I never have to do again forcefed me oxygen
because I wanted breath less than anything else.
Breath, a previous curse.
Breath, a neglected caretaker.
Breath, alchemy.
Breath, the thank you that sounds like all of your names even without letters.
two truths
- You get what you settle for.
- You become what you ignore, deflect, and avoid.
I have a double-life and neither can survive
Sometimes, they aren’t in love with me.
They think that they’re in love with me but they aren’t.
Other people aren’t mad libs whose blank spaces are feverishly populated by my projections.
Other people know their feelings better than I do.
What I do know is that some people love me because I’m the closest thing to something that they want for themselves. And having me close means that it’s theirs by association:
Queerness, mentors, chosen family, confidence, community, self-awareness, vulnerability…. They can have these things, too. It’s just scary to reach by yourself when another body can be the bridge.
These people don’t get that I will always fail them, and they will always be left wanting because my things are never theirs. And I’m not an answer, just a woman.
I don’t dare say these things to them. But I feel it— registering in my blood pressure spikes, centimeters I peel away, the unintentional jab I throw because I keep suppressing my discomfort.
I hurt myself to protect someone else’s ’ feelings. and then I wonder why I always implode in the same circumstances. There’s no way to give them the woman they want and give me myself. It’s a truth my jaw hurts to chew on.
Concept
Justice, a noun defined by men in my classes, professors, men in my family
Justice is a gun in the hand,
Human behind bars,
Electric chairs or no voting rights on some charges.
Justice from women, not all, but more than anywhere else
Justice is a verb,
Can be distributed through nouns: food, shelter, blankets, diapers, doctors visits instead of an emergency room.
Can be call each other instead of the cops,
Neighbors Watching the baby since I can’t afford daycare.
The back of my brain yells, “not all men”.
you’re right. It’s not.
But it is most men in power,
is still the definition their heirs inherit.
If justice is symbolized by scales, a cut in one and a bullet hole through the other destroys the whole thing.
Destiny Denial
I call myself a “bitch”
A “c*nt”
It’s my apology for inciting other’s discomfort by existing.
“sorry that I am loud and different and can’t smile and nod through some harmful words,
Sorry that everyone can feel the fumes from my nervous system when arrogance makes the air so thick that no one can breathe.”
I say that I’m a bitch because I want to be in on the joke,
Want to be a teller instead of a punchline.
How it’s fair to blame the reactor before the actor still confuses me.
An unlikable woman harmed equivocates to being unharmed.
I call myself a “bitch” so I can harm myself before someone else gets to hurt me.
It doesn’t work.
No one challenges my self-identification. They don’t have to– I was the one to say it.
Still, something feels worse in the silent agreement than if someone called me it outright.
Maybe that’s how they see me after all.
Embarrassingly, I wonder how many people would remain if I stopped harming myself in these innocuous ways,
That maybe people can only tolerate me when I vocalize what a burden I am.
My favorite people are women called “bitches” and “c*nts”.
Women who piss people off make my world go round.
I am their biggest fan.
I’m not sure why I can’t be mine,
why I can’t accept that I’m likely a variant of the very women I look up to
Maybe because a woman who likes herself with no interest in other’s opinion on how she feels about herself is still a social crime.
Factory Defects
A local creamery made an ice cream flavor that is both chocolate and cayenne pepper. I can’t call myself this because it’s a Latinx palette, in the family of Mexican hot chocolate. My blood type is soda bread, and when my grandmother sailed from Ireland to New York city, she probably thought that ketchup was spicy. What I know for sure is that her son, my father, thought that salsa was an appropriate substitute for tomato sauce. My point is that part of me is cayenne pepper–more of me than I’d like, more of me than I know what to do with. I try to hide it, but even a gentle breeze has everyone feeling me in a way that registers on the Scobbe Scale.
I worry that I was made by a God who phoned it in–
I’m some very strong things while being a vacuum of others.
Mountains of self-help books and TED Talks emphasize vulnerability,
But my real has her own battleground drummer boy.
My vulnerable, my authentic self–
She’s a rebel-rouser. Deep down, I am not a sympathetic woman.
I’m all jagged edges with none fitting anywhere without drawing blood.
Options dwindle these days, and I can’t figure out where I fit, nor can I minimize myself and stay there.
I feel like a dangerous creature
who might be better in exile than in public.
I don’t want that.
I just want to believe that my sharp edges are on purpose,
were intentional in my design,
cleared appropriately by quality control.
I want a reassurance, a breadcrumb in the direction of purpose.
I want less resistance to existing.
Yard yielding
A floral bush rests on the back corner of my apartment building.
It doesn’t belong to an arrangement or landscaping plan,
Just bush, bark, and earth beside brick.
October yawned across the neighborhood,
and it’s pretty.
All Midwestern autumn and local charm.
Walking from my car to apartment, I saw the hedge.
Flowers browning,
Green beginning to exhale her chlorophyll from the leaves.
The bush
it…
She
let’s go with grace
Not in a pretty way like the leaves on the ground who dye themselves russet, goldenrod, and chestnut.
The flowers droop dishwater blonde.
But she’s letting go in her own time,
without controlling how her grief is visible on the outside.
This is a season whom she doesn’t ask to change.
She accepts it,
Releasing grip on leaves and vanity as chilly mornings make it harder to hold on. The sight makes sense in showing what none of us can avoid,
what we struggle in accepting.
It is. That’s all the bush is saying. It is without explanation or pretense or profundity. It is and this is the most adaptive way I’ve found to survive.
Me, too.
Marisa McGrath 