The Ladies’ Handy Book

You are here now.
You will listen to me.
I’ll shriek what
I have to shriek,
and you will listen.

. . .

I was 14. I was in
Reno, Nevada. My mother
had curled my hair
earlier in the day.
I wore men’s shoes
and a dress that seemed
to have lived
through the dustbowl,
black and filmy with
dim cabbage roses.
The men followed
closely behind, trailing
me like coyotes on the
thick silent hotel carpets,
through casino to arcade
to elevator.

I was 13. I was in
Leavenworth, Washington.
My grandmother was coming home
to die of cancer, but I
thought she would get well.
I wore a t-shirt and shorts,
I walked down a public street
with my hand in my father’s
hand, while two strangers
carved my chest to pieces
with their eyes and words.

I was 4 or 5. I was
at daycare, where kids
ate their own snot out of
hunger, and we were kept
in a cold garage with
broken dingy toys and
a scrap of shag carpeting
over the cement floor.
The matron chain-smoked,
collected soup labels and
yelled at us, and an older
boy looked at me in a way
I could not abide.

I was 2 or 3. I was
at daycare, my mother
had curled my hair earlier
in the day. This was how
I learned the alphabet
through my fear of being
burned in the face.
My dresses were too short,
my frilly pants showing beneath.
The matron showed me
off to guests who came by,
like a tiny whore.

I was 17. I lived
in the basement, alone
with a full-length mirror.
I dressed and undressed only
in the dark. I showered three
or four times a day. I wore
skirts and never showed
an ankle. Coerced into an
uncharacteristic hot tub one
night, I wore a full-length shift
and apologized for my nakedness.

I was instructed
from a tender age
to be beautiful
in order not
to be worthless
or invisible.
I was instructed
to use it as a weapon
against males, against
other females.
I was not instructed
not to maim myself
in the process.

I was 8 or 9 when
I told my grandmother,
who saw her face taking shape
in mine, that I could hear sometimes
two voices — one slow, one fast –
behind the rest of my thoughts,
arguing. She advised me
not to mention it in company.

Two halves of me
eventually stopped talking
to each other. The one
half convinced of my
physically deformed grotesquery,
the other waging
a scorched earth campaign
with the only kind of power
I’d ever been offered.

I was 28. I was
in another place.
I heard two halves talking
for a few seconds,
the first time in centuries.

. . .

I want to grab you
by the throat and spit
the words in your face.
I do not care that this is
not a poem, or that it and I
will be forgotten, already have been
forgotten, were never of any consequence
to begin with, and you may stop listening
now, as I have become suddenly
unimportant.