What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Poem/A Woman Speaks

Trigger warning: rape themes. 

Feminist anger happened today. I am sick of victims being blamed for rape. I am sick of victim-blamers moaning about how unfair it is that rape victims aren’t willing to rationally discuss the possibility that being raped was their fault, thereby forcing the blamer to conclude that it really was their fault, and all because people just won’t explain it properly. GAH.

So instead of screaming at the internet*, I decided to lapse into poetry.

This was the result:

.

A Woman Speaks

.

My sexuality is not

a red rag waved at a raging bull,

my breasts are not bread to be pulled apart

by your starving hands;

I am not responsible for the way your gaze

rakes over me like a plough through soil:

.

I am not here for you.

.

Being female is not

a challenge

a threat

or an act of lunacy

when committed before some miser of skin

who’d deny me the right

to deny his entry:

.

I am not meat or an unlocked door;

I am not treasure, I am not silk or porcelain;

I am not the sum of the things you want from me, stranger

who judges my shape like the hooves of livestock:

.

I owe you nothing.

.

I do not care

that you saw me pass on street or bridge

and thought that day I was just for you,

the flavour of girl you’d craved all week

like a boutique beer or ice-cream cone:

I am not your sweet; I am not your lost resolve.

.

My body is not a provocation.

My skin is not

the threat of aggression

that intimates violence, blood-knuckled and raw

as a gutted fish. My naked legs

are not a pair of middle fingers raised

to some vile enemy in whose lands I walk –

my arms, my thighs, my stomach, throat and mons

are all my soverign territory;

.

my clothes are not mouths that scream abuse

at passers-by, forcing some archaic choice

of redress or dishonour;

.

nor am I prey, a girl-made-doe

whose life is lived with the threat of jaws,

whose survival is luck, and whose gore-streaked death

is predicted by animal nature, Darwin

or some other magic eight-ball – listen!

.

My flesh and blood are not the Eucharist:

consuming me will not absolve

the act of consumption.

I am not Andromeda chained to the rock,

a virgin sacrifice sent to placate

the sea-wreathed serpent of demanding lust:

.

I am not a house

that begs to be broke-and-entered, and if you insist

on using your wants

to extrapolate mine,

then you only succeed

in destroying yourself.

.

Stranger,

I name you:

.

bull and beggar,

miser and thief – a covetous, angry,

superstitious fossil:

.

a self-made beast.

.

.

*There was still some screaming at the internet. Just less of it.

  1. piknight23 reblogged this from fozmeadows
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  4. dukenarrativium reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    Click through for a pretty great poem.
  5. xo-missymarie-blog reblogged this from fozmeadows
  6. fozmeadows posted this