I am present in this moment:
twenty-nine,
trauma survivor,
my own corpse’s reviver:
my story is, if nothing else,
my own.
I float here suspended by:
things I could write or
rewrite,
gender-swap,
cluster-fuck,
“monologue,
memory,
rant,
pray,”
subvert,
pervert,
perfect—
until I see myself reflected there,
a little glimmer of something
that hasn’t yet been claimed.
“I am a feminist,”
Maya Angelou said
“I’ve been female for a long time
and it’d be stupid not to be on my own side,”
(it lives in my sternum, hard and fast)
“We cannot succeed,”
Malala Yousafzai-- at once years younger and
centuries older than I am-- said,
“we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”
(it lives under my fingernails, in between my toes)
“I am not free,”
Audre Lorde (curling herself around my spinal cord,)
“I am not free while any woman is unfree,
even when her shackles are different from my own.”
It presses against my heart.
With gratitude, I am at once pious and indulgent,
letting my body be female and
human and
alive.
With gratitude, I thank the sisters that came before me for this honor
for this right
for wave after
wave after
wave after
wave after
wave of progress:
“Be nobody’s darling,”
Alice Walker said,
(behind my eyelids, at the nape of my neck,)
“take the contradictions of your life and wrap them around you like a shawl.”
“You do not have to be good!”
Mary Oliver reminds me,
(soothing mystomach, unclenching my fists)
“You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.”
It presses against my heart.
I wade in the tides these women have weathered,
the ebbs and flows,
times of plenty and of naught,
bodies battered
statistics shattered
phases of the moon under which they’ve hissed and
howled and
harangued,
uterine blood shed
month after month
year after year
creating
and carving
and careening toward
this space on the sidewalk
where I stand,
present.
This space that, over eons,
has been made for me,
a space that allows me to have so much to say
and so many ways to say it
that I hardly know where to begin.
It presses against my heart.