Redneck Mafia

This poem resists being a poem.

Redneck Mafia

It’s hard to write about something so unsolvable 
as the body. 

You don’t want to be too calculated 
about it, but everyone attacks with ideas about the body.

Sometimes we even attack ourselves 
with ideas about the body. 

One dog longingly awaits his owner 
and one droplet of rain from the sky. 

My man drove off with the music and so I’m left
here with my thoughts about the body.

Honey, Honey what do you think 
of this broke down old hag? 

I had to climb the stairs one thousand times 
while men humiliated me saying don’t nag us so much, please 

don’t nag. My mouth was their mother’s 
mouth. My body was their wife’s body. It’s things like this 

that make you despise the body. Do bad things 
to the body. My hip was burning every trip up the stairs. 

I carried a cake shaped like a pot 
with a crab coming out the top

up and down one thousand stairs. I stopped taking progesterone.
I stopped taking walks. My ovary pounding, splitting, 

breaking open or something. No one will tell me 
what it is gives me this insufferable pain. Being a woman 

makes you want to cry all of the time. People think
that women cry all of the time inherently, 

but if it wasn’t so humiliating we wouldn’t be crying. 
People look at you like an animal. It’s cliche. 

But people do look at you like an animal. 
and talk to you like an animal. You can tell they would eat you 

if you died in the room with them. The goal is to write
a feminist poem based in shame. That is what it is to be 

a woman, this poem resists 
being a poem. After high-school, 

I stopped being a feminist  because it’s embarrassing, almost childish, 
to stand here in this body and say anything. 

Especially I’m a feminist and I don’t mean 
what she means and she means and she means 

by it anyway. So I stopped saying it. 
I don’t think I should get paid more 

because I’m a woman, 
I just think everyone should get paid more.

I thought the Redneck Mafia of Rowan County High was funny
even though they wanted to wound me. I would have joined
 
had I a truck. I am a naysayer
but in the simplest of terms—a queer.

I hate simple terms, but quite simply, 
Kim Deal’s body was beautiful to me.

The Redneck Mafia was objectively funny. 
People wanting to hurt me for being a woman and for being 

not straight set me free. Less simply, you can see the walk
of a girl who was popular in middle school

through infinite time and space. I’m eleven
and wearing my stupid red puffy pants

I never should have worn. I don’t know what it is about the idea 
of the shade tree that has me under its thumb. My hand 
is a forced hand.