Womanly

What
Does it mean?

To be
Womanly

Is it merely
To push life out of you

To walk
Barefoot and broken

Abnegate
With a Scarlet letter on your breast

Or is it more
Visceral, intricate, guttural, real

Like perhaps
The iridescent shimmer of broken glass

As it sticks
And gleams prettily on your open wrist

A pink gash
To compensate for the one between your legs

A blue vein
Hastily stitched up, bandaged and recompensed

Is that it then
Are you a woman now?

Carved marble-like
A suffering, persevering, patient creature

From a blade
An ecclesiastical scalpel

That punishes
The sinful, the splintered, the shameless

I think not
For reasons that might seem uncomely

You are
Blood and bone

Conscientious
About your own volatility and insignificance

Your blood
Is crimson, but also violet and cerulean and green

Quite like
The bruises that are meant to discipline, but not display

Tell me
Again what it means

To be
flinted and livid and discordant and hungry

Tell me
I pray, Erudite

What
Is it after all

To be
Womanly

[Featured GIF: giphy.com]

[Featured art: Sarah Modak]

Girl

I say it enough.
Out loud and in faint whispers.
Scrawled in ink on pieces of picayune paper.

I breathe the word.
Even in the callouses of my fingers and the stubble on my legs,
I channel the very pneuma of the notion as I understand it.

A girl, I say to myself,
Is a contradiction,
Drifting between the innocence she was and the woman she wants to be.

Brilliant, cautious, and fractured,
A magnificently fucked up creature.
A paradox, really.

Just like a hurricane.
Or a monument.
Or me.

Have I convinced you yet?
Good.
For I don’t think I can quite get myself to believe.

(This post is an afterthought. Read original post here.)

[Feature image via: Silvia Grav]

To Marilyn Monroe – Girl

Dear Marilyn,

The camera does strange things to you. Makes your lips quiver and your eyes twitch.

By you I mean me.

I work in a place where they need actors for free sometimes, even actors that aren’t actors will do. They dress me up like a girl, do up my hair, decorate my skin with peach paste and flair.

I don’t mind really. I don’t enjoy it either. But later when I look back, the nothingness I feel will be etched with fondness brought by nostalgia, fondness there never was to begin with.

Sorry, I tend to stray from the point. Point being, let’s return to the point of retreat.

For a moment there, a moment held in time, clasped in its palm like a miniscule gem, I was a girl. A girl as we know girls to be.

Pretty, thoughtless, sharp and melancholy.

A girl like you. A girl unlike me.

Time made a girl out of you too. Changed your name, the fibres of your dress, the pores in your skin. The quintessence of your memory.

Were you a girl then, Marilyn?

A female, a princess, a maiden, a fucking damsel in distress?

Pretty, thoughtless, sharp and melancholy.

Here we stop, because here we get to the point. Here we zip-lock our premeditations and wayward emotions. Here we rephrase.

Girl is a mountain, a giant.

She is invincible.

Pretty, thoughtless, sharp and melancholy.

Bold, broken, reckless and spectacular.

That’s the girl we are, aren’t we? That’s the girl we see.

I’m not sexist/feminist/anarchist or anything fancy like that.
I’m a Girl.

A girl who is confused, bewildered, contradicted and exhausted by everything having to be labelled and put up on the metaphorical bulletin board. I DON’T WANT TO BE pretty, thoughtless, sharp and melancholy.

What if I want to be the nothingness I feel? What if I want to exist metaphysically? This time, not metaphorically.

I’m tired of defining every little thing. ESPECIALLY. Especially, the girl I want to be.

Aren’t you?

That’s all.

Love,
Girl