it won’t be bruised
becoming phosphorescent – fluorescent
warm & glowing from my core.
thank god i’ve found the one. no more walls,
castles, shields, or fear.
with him i am safe and only a little bruised.
in all the ways to kill a woman,
find my collarbones, my ribs,
my cheekbones, and my wrists. the sharp angles
between food and clothes
between love and hate
between judgments and a smile.
i’m not the kind of woman who
dies on my own.
i’m the kind who grows thinner &
thinner & thinner
until gray becomes my color and all you can see
are my veins and my bones,
skin paper thin,
familial tears raining on my casket,
“Oh, but she was so beautiful in the end.”
it won’t be a bullet - Danez Smith
In their poem it won’t be a bullet, Danez Smith creates a juxtaposition between two ways to die, as a Black and queer person. They wrote this poem soon after they got diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, so he creates a poem in the ways in which either of their identities could end their life, whether it be in the hospital with doctors, or from a bullet in their body. From the title of the piece and the line, “I am not the kind of black man who dies on the news,” it is clear that the ending that they decided for themselves is not one of violence, as it is for so many African Americans. With this poem and the topics it explores, Smith not only presents some very grim possible outcomes for their life, but also highlights the dangers of simply being as a Black, queer person. They show how their own identity, and particularly aspects of it that they cannot change or control, places them under constant threat of danger, whether it be from outside or inside sources. My poem explores a little of the same but in accordance to my identity as a woman instead. I also juxtapose two different ways to die as a woman. One of them is referencing my previous poem “not All men,” and the subject of femicide that that poem reflects upon (my mother’s cousin). So many women around the world are attacked and/or killed in domestic violence attacks, or by someone they know, they trust, and are familiar with. In fact, most assault cases are committed by someone that the woman trusted and knew. So, as a woman, there is always the danger that one day, maybe, your male partner will lose their grip on their fuse and it begins with one bruise here and one bruise there until your whole body turns black & blue and you will no longer get up. The other avenue that my poem explores is that of body dysmorphia, of anorexia, of starving oneself right into their casket. This one is a bit more personal, as this is something that for a big part of my life, I have gone through. A lot of the times, the body dysmorphia that seems to come along with every woman since birth, kind of like a 2-for-1 sale, is reinforced solely through their outside environment, which then, becomes a part of themselves and they maintain it for themselves without the initial input of social media and their social circles. Other times, that influence is compounded by their families. Women are constantly judged, threatened, assaulted, guilted and manipulated into having a sort of Stockholm Syndrome; where we think that we enjoy dieting, and looking at our reflections in every single reflective surface available, until those judgments, the threats, the looming fear of assault, the manipulations and the guilting become so internalized that we do it to ourselves, like death by a thousand cuts, thinking that it’s for ourselves instead of everyone else that thinks they are entitled to an opinion. Both avenues discussed in my poems are slow deaths, but neither of them are less violent in their process and in their outcome.
****
& even women teach their sons
to say “your body, my choice”
imagine a rose, upon seeing a garden
full of roses, cuts others’ stems in
self-righteousness, prays some gardener will choose
them instead. imagine
a terrified pregnant girl, fear as if death
Himself was looming closer with the broken
coat hanger. she looks in the mirror and sees
that broken pregnant girl fading into her shadows.
she turns from the memory with a painted smile,
looking down at her little boy,
promising him the world
and neglecting hers.
& even the black guy’s profile reads sorry, no black guys - Danez Smith
In their poem, Danez Smith touches upon the psychological cognitive dissonance that sometimes follows a deep-rooted self-hatred or lack of a clear self-identity, stemming from the constant hate, discrimination, and racism that African Americans endure in their daily lives. Sometimes when you hear something enough times, you start to believe it; and when there is so much hate thrown at you, it can become internalized into self-hatred. In Smith’s poem, they show how this self-hatred can translate into every aspect of life, including sexual preferences, creating situations in which people scratch off a huge portion of the population as potential partners for the simple fact that they look like them. In my poem I try to address the issue that it creates for the women’s rights movement for other women to propagate the male, patriarchal agenda. Just how in his poem, Danez Smith touches upon the self-hatred that many Black people have internalized, I try to touch upon that as well but from a female standpoint. In my poem, the first stanza is modeled after the original “& even the black guy’s profile reads sorry, no black guys,” changing the tulip imagery to a rose, as it is the flower that represents womanhood and femininity. The first stanza, especially with the lines “prays some [male] gardener will choose / them instead,” addresses the issue where women are pitted against each other, as though we are constantly competing against each other by ‘cutting others’ stems,’ rather than trying to lift each other up in a world where its first instinct is already to stomp us out. The second stanza, however, is a little more specific to the hypothetical story of a hypothetical woman in her young years, before Roe V. Wade won, in which she had to endure a highly traumatic abortion. And while she was able to survive that procedure, not many women do. Once she was settled and ready to have a child, she had a little boy. The scene is painted as though she is looking at herself in the mirror and sees the memory of that young pregnant girl reflected back at her – a memory which she has buried deep, deep down, to try to forget that trauma. Sometimes, when someone denies and buries a part of themselves in order to forget, they end up supporting the polar opposite of what most connects to their experience. In this case, the woman in the poem is running away so hard and fast from the young girl in her shadow, that she ends up running towards the exact thing that created that girl in her memories. So when she turns from the mirror and the girl she once was, she paints a smile on her face for her son, teaching him nothing about women’s rights, about the importance of valuing women as equal human beings to himself, neglecting her trauma – imposing it on thousands of women to come, creating another man who will go out into the world voting, alongside her, for the overturning of Roe V. Wade. Of course, this is a highly hypothetical story, but there are thousands of women out there who never say ‘no’ to their sons, never teaching them the meaning of the word, nor the importance of respecting women out in the world, unleashing the entitled, spoiled men that become the ones that become the perpetrators of the propagation of women’s inequality as well as assaults, rapes, violence, and pain. These women that have been so deeply brainwashed by a society that has constantly undermined them, help continue and further the men’s rights movement, allowing them to have female mascots to have the right say “even She doesn’t think so,” when women don’t even have the right to rule over our own bodies.