She lay in bed
With movie screen eyelids
And see-through skin,
So thin
That anyone can read her secrets published
In bold print between muscle fibers

She has always preferred to sleep in the dark;

Door closed,
No night-light

That way she could focus on the crack of light beneath the bedroom door
And know exactly when shadows of shoes like two dark ghosts
Crept across her floorboard warning her

He was coming

The signal to surround herself in ice

She is frozen,
Still and silent
Like she’d learned long ago.
The canopy
That once loomed so strong above her is now just a heavy shadow
Though she no longer has to suck breath
Through the rusty cage clawing at her lips,
She fears she will never free the trapped screams
Caught in the web he left in her throat
Or his silhouette
Incessantly slithering across her skin
She wonders

If she will ever be able to collapse into bed after a long day of work,

Let the soft sheets hug her tired muscles,
Massage them to sleep without interruption…

She never touches the shower wall

Cold tile shudders
Memory from bone marrow
Of being pressed wet against it,
Feet dangling,
Stake driven from crotch to heart,
She wonders
If she will ever be able to dig the crusted betrayal from beneath her fingernails
It seems

Such a part of her now…

Or will she ever disentangle the grief knotted inside her jaw?

The fear still crawls in the cracks of her lips.

Her boyfriend
Can’t understand why she won’t have sex with him in the shower
Can’t stand the sound of him grunting
Mixed with the spray of water

And why she can only have sex with the lights on

So she can see his face

Shadowy canopies are hard to distinguish
And then
He’ll have to get the blow dryer from the bathroom to melt her
Again

That day
When she first slept with her head above the covers was so triumphant
No longer curling into herself,
Face down,
Hugging her chest tightly
Between arms and pillow
Or the first time
She made it through the gyno without sobbing
Breathed herself through their invasion,
Patient
Or the first time
She used a tampon
Or the first time
She slept without her bra on
These
Are her
Small victories
See Daddy’s little princess is trying to grow past her past
But memory
Curls itself in her crevices and always knocks uninvited.
She has become an expert in time traveling
Only hoping to dislodge these visions from the backs of her eyelids
Maybe then she could travel back
Tell him

About her favorite t-shirt

The one she used to sniff

The one she stole off that teddy bear
Because she liked it better
And cigarette stained and dirty
Smelled like comfort
And her daddy

Maybe then he’d have known how much she loved him
And he would have only touched her

To hug her
Tears encrust
Around the edge of her chin
As she surrenders
Matted hair
To wet pillow
And the kindness of sleep
Begins to creep into her
And this borrowed shame
Curled in the pit of her gut
Uncoils itself
Dissolves like his smoke
Like his swarming saliva
Like her kaleidoscope irises
And as her dreams
Begin to float
Between bits of filthy consciousness she makes one last wish that one day
Her body
Could feel
Like home.

This intricate delicate gateway of creation.

Recently tired of the three am

Ring ring,

'Hey baby, Wanna come pick me up?'

Calls
And men using me for sex, calling ourselves 'friends'
I became tired of being seen as just

A pussy.

When I was 20 years old,
Haunted every time I pulled up my warm sheets and closed my eyes to sleep
With invasive images

Of my five year old sheets being coldly taken off of me,

Held down in bed and raped,
I used to start fights with every cat-callin car drivin by,
Immediately reminded that I

Was just

A pussy
A cute petite chick to stick their dick in

Pussy. 

My first poem book had the word 'PUSSY'
Large black letters on a white background, taped to the cover
This was to remind me of what I didn't want to be and motivate me to spit poetry

See, Pussy is what we call ourselves when we mean weak,
When we mean cowardly,
When we mean- something to be ashamed of

But how could something so desired be so hated and so abused?
How could something so powerful be so beaten and so bruised, used?

See this myth of creation we've been brainwashed to believe in
Tells us that she came from him
Was made specially for him,

A toy for him to play with,

Have his way with
But if we're really made in the image of our Creator,
Then it's clear to me

That God is Goddess

 

The Creatrice

 

And that he

Came from Her

 

Pussy

See if the chicken came first and the eggs from inside her

And if life grows enfolded in her soft dark warmth for nine months

Preparing us for birth,

Then

In whose f**ked up backward garden

Could she have possibly came from his cracked rib? 

Crack one for me. 

Make a baby.

See it's not men who spread their seed,

But fertilize the seeds already planted inside her from birth.

The creative force of the universe is female. 

Always understood to be such

Until there was a deliberate attack on the religions of the Goddess. 

No one mentioned those ‘idols’ they were told to smash

From those ‘heathen’ religions had breasts. 

See- in the Judeo-Christian tradition,

Marriage, Purity Laws, and Circumcision came at the same time. 

Marriage began to track the father line. 
Prior to this our family tree was female. 
Every strand in the web of life it's roots created was red,

Connected by menstrual blood. 
The only blood that doesn't come from a wound,

The blood that nourishes babies,

This blood was considered sacred. 
This was before the Purity Laws

Which deemed menstruating women 'dirty' and 'impure'
And made it a sin to touch a woman while she was bleeding,

When before it was a privilege to f**k her while she was bleeding. 
But the power of her blood was not yet forgotten,

Which is why they created circumcision
To mimic menstruation by creating blood on the head of a penis.

But we're not taught this.

 
See our roots are female.
And our fruit is female.
And every child up to three months in the womb is

 

Female.

That's why they twisted the myth.

Told us Eve was the downfall of Adam
Gave us the illusion that the abundant Earth surrounding us, isn't a garden...?
Created a separation from Our Mother Earth

And the Divine Feminine
So our power

Could be controlled.

Divide and conquer.

I wonder

If Our Mother is suffering from Empty nest syndrome...
Lovingly pushed us out of her nest

So we could find our wings

Which she knows she can't flap for us,
Does She miss us?

Thunderstorm tears for us

And hurricane our pain

Does she wait,

Watching

Her children

 

Disrespected

Raped

Sought after
Controlled

We birth
We suffer
We break
And we survive

So call me a pussy. 

In fact, I think I'll write the word

PUSSY

On my new poem book

 

To remind me

 

To be proud

 

To be seen as

 

Just

 

That.

He’s a warm body in a cold bed.

He’s a dream of love
In a life
That’s become blurred
In a whirlwind
Of naked bodies,
Unsteady hearts
And conflict

He distracted me with romance

Until the inevitable disappointment returned me to myself.

The grief I’m afraid to feel leaves an open grave inside my chest
So there was nowhere for him to fall
But in,
Buried by a confused undertaker,
237 down…

Loneliness has become my closest lover.

Silly Cinderella Story nightmares haunt my daydreams,
Disillusionment knocks on every cracked window in the castle
But I’ve outlawed funeral rites for princes
Scar tissue is so much stronger than smooth skin.

I miss love like home.
3000 miles away from the last time
Someone touched me
Like they gave a shit
Another disappointing affair
Packed up with the garbage

Hope
Keeps wrapping itself inside smiling liars
If I’d never known love,
I wouldn’t know
What I was missing
Desperate grasping for the past
In the present
Chains the future

I’ve fallen in love at first sight too many times to count.

I swallow infatuation like a drug,
Addicted to my imagination
Too stubborn to be swayed by the impossible
The Earth must shake from beneath me
My last breath taunt my lungs
Grasping the edge of my death,
I gasp back to life again

My bed doesn’t have guardrails

But rainbows are created in quartz crystals when they crack from stress.

I would have fought for him like gathering my pennies
To pay for fountain flicked wishes,
One by one,
Dreaming for him with each bit of copper
Sunken under ripples
Of childish faith.

Never got past the bent corner on Page 5,
A few words from the abstract stumbled from my tongue
But he never put his feet up
Spent a lazy Sunday
Never dug in

He was the grain of sand that invaded my shell
Scratched my tenderness
Until I formed a pearl,

So how could I ever complain?

With heavy hands I grab my shovel
And begin filling the grave left open too long,
Slowly making solid ground
For new love
To stand on.

I call my artistic expression "healing art" and my primary motivating force is complete freedom. I write, make art, and perform on stage to heal and free myself and others primarily. Secondarily, I present myself and my art to entertain and make a career for myself. In my opinion, one of the worst means of attack on freedom and democracy, comes psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, in the form of a person enslaved by themselves, their brainwashing, their history, or their trauma. In order for society to be truly free, its people must be safe, healed, and psychologically and spiritually free, as well as, and of course, physically free from societal institutions and isms. My work is aimed toward these goals.

Article:

• Hope Springs Institute's
  Women's Poetry and Performance Retreat
  Introduction by Alice Lovelace
  Peebles, Ohio
  
• Annual Hope Springs Women’s Poetry and Performance Retreat 
  A Weekend of Nourishment, Writing, and Connection
  by Chauncey Beaty, Rita J. Andrews, and Suzanne Stevens

Poetry by:

• April S.
• Rhythm