Evening Will Come

Sometimes feminism seemed a miracle, a cork bobbing up for air in the ocean.
Or I was the cork and the ocean was everything else that conspired and conspires to be like a cage.
I was young and easily astonished, stunned, insulted. I was often subsumed by the vagaries of my sex, and this remains a source.
When I first began writing poetry, first began thinking of poetry, I was certain that I could rely on the I/eye, which turned out to be the most elusive quality. So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you and hate off with you.
Sylvia Plath’s work gave me synaesthesic pleasure. The speaker’s self-mortification perverted the edges of all her lines with sweetish vinegar.
Her poetry was pungent when so little poetry is pungent. Poetry of regimented epiphany smelled like fabric softener when I was young.
I liked my poetry to smell like I had forgotten my deodorant. You could smell me from across the table. I liked my work to smell of work and fuck.
I wanted to make bloody holes in the earth with my body like Ana Mendieta, but with poems.
That was when I was young, but it’s still true now.
I’m a feminist for all the bodies strewn over history and semi-emerging from the earth.
My mother once was sharp. Now, she’s delusional and terrified from dementia.
My baby sister killed herself and other girls have killed themselves since then.
I write angry that these women had little agency in this world and that they are not in books.