“Architecture”
I spent my childhood
and adolescence learning
that I would be leapt on
and talked over and laughed
at, and if I complained,
told to shut up.
And if I wondered
why girls didn’t do
certain important things,
I would be told it simply
wasn’t in their nature,
wasn’t what they wanted,
they simply weren’t interested,
and they cried too much anyway,
watched bad movies and drove
poorly, and had their periods
all the time and were best left
to straddle the hoods of cars
or drape themselves across
the appliances of their
inevitable trade.
When I come to each morning,
crippled with anxiety and
confident only that I will never
measure up, never exist
beyond this pen and this
paper and my piecemeal
existence, and am paralyzed
with fright and the remembrance
of past humiliations, wondering
why am I so weak and
so defective,
and then think of
the child who would have
saved the world with a hug,
told jokes into the apocalypse,
and driven her race car while
writing poems and flying fighter
jets and talking to animals
and cupping spiders in
her small, certain palm
I am reminded that I did not
enter the world this way, I have
been sculpted and carefully
engineered to doubt my constitution,
to be afraid of the mess
it would make to seize power,
the degradation I would face
and the violence I would suffer
at the hands of my makers,
my thoughtful architects,
the artisans who have arranged me
for thirty years down to the last
doubt and eyelash.
