This is for the old folks who I've been missing and haven't visitted in ages. How are you? How've you been? What have I missed? I'm enjoying reading your words again. Rediscovering everybody. This is the only thing I've written in 2006 that I haven't edited until there was nothing left.



Swallowed Woman




I am not a feminist
But I do have one that sits under my ear
And she is one judgemental bitch
She tells me stories
About me when I was young and I had a voice and it was loud
About me when I was a beast who couldn't be tamed
About me reading poetry in a crowd and
How I fucked a woman more than once

She remembers when the dr said
I'll give you these morning after pills, but
You have to protect yourself because
Protecting yourself is the only way to ensure your freedom and
self protection is a right that many women fought hard to achieve and
Young woman,
you can't come back here for these pills again
It is your RIGHT and your RESPONSIBILITY
to make sure that your wild nights don't grow into
wildly needing babies
and
he predicted it

one year later my
wildly growing fetus started
changing my plans and flipping in belly water
born to be my redefinition
stripped me of my labels and named me mother
taught me how to run on pure necessity even on sleepless nights when
I woke up with nothing left to offer but "mommy"
mommy needs sleep, mommy needs to eat something, mommy's nipples hurt
taught me how sometimes it's more important to gurgle and tickle and just be
together than to
just be on time for once
time has stopped
and my self is being built quietly in the background while I
move nimbly among necessities and have to's and renegotiations
my inner poet is lost inside the pockets of my diaper bag, and my feminist is
stuck on top of my shoulder whispering to me that I
am the mom of girls and I
need to remember what it is to be a woman
in order to teach my girls
how to be the woman that I used to be before
I lost my feminism and gained my family
Because I've learned to make peace with a peaceful woman that
just isn't me
I've learned to make peace with my necessities and my silence and my
silent necessities But I cannot raise strong women unless I can remember how to be one