Et tu, Vodka?
I have written a political poem! Also my first poem in fucking ever! This is weird!
Odds
It is a shock to the system,
an awful, awing epiphany,
to realize my body,
this body They insist on naming Woman
on treating as
object, idol, toy,
& which They now prepare to call
abhorrent, unnatural, mistaken,
but which I alone know,
in which I must reside;
this my body is here
& intact
only through the realization of improbable calculations,
a single metaphysical slip past unlikely odds,
the incalculable, incomparable roll of the die of my life,
cast through each unrealized reality
to land
where it has,
this time,
within this time & place & set of circumstances,
fearfully fortuitous;
the presiding factors weighed inside
the vast and calloused hands of Time
& He saw fit to set me here;
not 50 years earlier
anywhere within the Reich’s walls around continental Europe,
where who I am or who I love or how I think
would have been cause
to starve or shoot or poison or burn me,
any one of them alone;
nor born in the horn of Africa,
where my mother may well
have held me down
while an unsterilized blade scraped away
the soft skin of my cunt;
& I did not come from her womb
with my clitoris a fraction of a centimeter oversized,
overgrown, in want of pruning;
& when I grew enough that the cracks inside my mind
could be seen from the outside,
she did not tie me tightly into my child safety seat
and slide the family van into a lake
on the illformed, unfounded notion
she had something to save me from,
& could;
& I have never lain prone beneath an EMT
who tore through my trousers
or the bindings on my breasts
with a pair of trauma sheers
& discovered something he did not expect
or deign to salvage;
not any of these,
&, instead, here,
where still, i have suffered,
have been instilled with the fear of it,
but have risked so very little,
comparatively,
in landing in this single place & time,
allowed to be,
incredibly,
alive
& whole
by the blessing of
unjust chance
& unearned privilege;
the blessing of birth inside
the safety of whiteness,
of the Western world,
of the ultimate realization of
the infamous American Dream:
that most perfect of classes,
the upper middle;
because I was coercively assigned
to the more attractive sex
but chose to become
the more respected;
because I can pretend sanity,
can imitate an appropriate sexuality,
& can keep it to myself
that know enough
to recognize this
for the rarity
it is.
Odds
It is a shock to the system,
an awful, awing epiphany,
to realize my body,
this body They insist on naming Woman
on treating as
object, idol, toy,
& which They now prepare to call
abhorrent, unnatural, mistaken,
but which I alone know,
in which I must reside;
this my body is here
& intact
only through the realization of improbable calculations,
a single metaphysical slip past unlikely odds,
the incalculable, incomparable roll of the die of my life,
cast through each unrealized reality
to land
where it has,
this time,
within this time & place & set of circumstances,
fearfully fortuitous;
the presiding factors weighed inside
the vast and calloused hands of Time
& He saw fit to set me here;
not 50 years earlier
anywhere within the Reich’s walls around continental Europe,
where who I am or who I love or how I think
would have been cause
to starve or shoot or poison or burn me,
any one of them alone;
nor born in the horn of Africa,
where my mother may well
have held me down
while an unsterilized blade scraped away
the soft skin of my cunt;
& I did not come from her womb
with my clitoris a fraction of a centimeter oversized,
overgrown, in want of pruning;
& when I grew enough that the cracks inside my mind
could be seen from the outside,
she did not tie me tightly into my child safety seat
and slide the family van into a lake
on the illformed, unfounded notion
she had something to save me from,
& could;
& I have never lain prone beneath an EMT
who tore through my trousers
or the bindings on my breasts
with a pair of trauma sheers
& discovered something he did not expect
or deign to salvage;
not any of these,
&, instead, here,
where still, i have suffered,
have been instilled with the fear of it,
but have risked so very little,
comparatively,
in landing in this single place & time,
allowed to be,
incredibly,
alive
& whole
by the blessing of
unjust chance
& unearned privilege;
the blessing of birth inside
the safety of whiteness,
of the Western world,
of the ultimate realization of
the infamous American Dream:
that most perfect of classes,
the upper middle;
because I was coercively assigned
to the more attractive sex
but chose to become
the more respected;
because I can pretend sanity,
can imitate an appropriate sexuality,
& can keep it to myself
that know enough
to recognize this
for the rarity
it is.