Attention!

It's official!

It's been put to the test!

No more need for affirmative action!

Negative reactionaries to progress

can give it a rest!

Ben and Jerry got married in California!

A Black man won the nomination!

Sally, Maria and Betty's votes have spoken.

(They have been voting for a while, now).

And big boys said,

"The glass ceiling has been broken

The sky's the limit, girl!

We've noted you shiny, curly haired character

Written your references

Patted you're assets

So go get ‘em, princess

Show ‘em what a classy girl like you can do

in this modern, liberated world."

And so...

And so...

(because I am a good girl)

I'll do exactly what they tell me to

 

With feminist ‘f*ck you's' unfurled from my cape

I'll drape myself with the strength of my fore-sister's name sakes.

I'll prove the big boys are liars.

To those dicks, toms and harrys, I'm just an ungrateful hag

And they're right.

I forgot to say thank you.

 

Soaring free from their unwanted self imposed dichotomy,

Up on my broom,

stick whittled with my own struggles,

I'll take the room I'm entitled to

I'll fly higher than their sturdy glass caps intend me to

Breaking my skin as I break boundaries

Bleeding life into new frontiers

Where gender doesn't matter

Where race doesn't matter

Where thought does matter

I'll sprinkle new energy into old ideas like

Equity and equality

With the sacrificial blood of my glass-cut elbows,

And a strong, firm, kiss my ****, boys.

 

I'll write my own references

With bald-headed hands

Around echoes of Dickenson and Cather.

Two straight haired, brunette, kick **** bitches

Who cackled when they laughed, so their boys called them witches, too.

 

 

And we'll stir up a witches' brew

From hard found ingredients

Tail of Integrity, eye of justice, the bones of humor and the skin of self acceptance.

We'll gather around,

Cackling sisters sounding off

Breathing out incantations of Sojourner's Truth

And breathing in youthful expectations of Eleanor, Bloomer and Toklas

We'll save all the drops that spill for a sunny day.

Cause, here lately, it seems to be sprinkling

Over cast with cast off ignorance from our fathers'

fathers' fathers' way of  thinking.

We'll capture the spills in glass bottles blown from broken ceilings

And leave the big boys reeling from the rest of the potion.

Heads dizzy from all the progress and commotion,

That making change can make.

I'll take all the endings and make them happy.

Volumes of sappy stories about everything being equal.

And then?

I'll do it again, and write a sequel.

 

Or I would, if my pen had the ability to write reality.

To right wrongs

To make the songs it sings real.

Instead of just stealing what it wishes were true.

Killing all the negative with affirmative reaction?

That's up to you.

 

 

 

The last blush of old roses

Spice and chamomile tea

Swirls steam in circular rivulets

Trickling slow circumferences to capture the distance

Between your flesh and my flesh

My breath mixes with yours, heady, with the scent of your heartbeat

And your heart beats steady with the racing of my pulse.

Your breasts on mine

Bellies pressed

Fingers, playing rhythm in four-four time, won't want to stop.

Don't want to stop.

Can't stop.

As long as the last blush of old roses

Spice and chamomile tea

Swirls steam in circular rivulets

Trickling slow circumferences to capture the distance

Between you

and me.