A Poetic Look at Womanhood in America.

Poetry From Blue Chynoweth

Presidents’ Day

Today, I’m reeling in my snark, agnostic quips 

about politics, like a fish hook whips my teeth through the murk, silky waters of vile purities and womanhood. 

It coats my skin in thick layers of slippery cancers, 

impeding my liberties like a secretly-robot-moth to an, apparently, hot-headed-flame. 

my two-toned activism steeps in that grease, 

steaming my skin with a stench of constraining blood, with the heat of burning textbooks, roaring with the 

rising genocide of truth in the child’s eye

take a twenty-four-hour-long shower in the ringing of silence to rid myself of any ruin, any trace, any stench, 

obstructing my pretty prose to complacency, macing me, 

a killing reestablishment of the reincarnation of the rhetoric we fight to refrain our future from reflecting our past, 

I can’t decide whether to tip my body into the void of true voice or violate my erupting cries to nourish my necessity for violent idleness. 

I wish to extinguish my mind and start with a clean slate, so that my futile efforts become a glittering display of ruin before my eyes, 

the perfect catastrophe of a news photographer, 

then watch everyone else ‘round here seeing the cascading lights as I did, the precursor, before they all realize that I was right, I was right, 

and note down in my notepad that all of their faces turned separately disgusted at the fact that a woman knew better, 

and, shortly after, continue asking my daily questions for the ex-rednecks who frequent my post-capitalism ptsd facility for troubled minds. 

I want to ask everyone if they care about true genocide with a lie detector and personally determine if their views are right or wrong, I say,

as they drag my thrashing body across the bitter, 

biting concrete floor of the lie detector room, 

eager to see if I was right

or wrong. I want to then become a public display, 

the witch is dead, the witch is dead, 

because I can’t bear to live in a world where fascism greets me at my front door with a carol.        

I want to figure out which religion is right, even though I 

know that there isn’t one, and know that we live in a country where, without blind faith, 

we consider ourselves truly blind. 

I want to find an answer among all of these non-answers and crawl into tiny spaces to retrieve it, though I know that the true answer is simply that I am a woman, and today is America.

940.04: Meditation On Death

My throes are this:

In the stillness of remembering,

I am fearful, America, and I still believe in

Speech to the progress toward,

We are self-soiled, we’ve

Dug our roots deep enough to reach the past and the future

That the words we pray on a mic get dirtied

Here are my dirtied words:

A woman wears a mans face and hands like petticoats

Dressed up like humans, like we can know who we are,

I feel incessant in the blood hound mouth, 

Dropping body parts at New York’s lady liberty.

I get a choice between one and two:

Procure project projection for pharma

Or put implants in my arms

I think I am scared

I’m white in the eyes, but cash-flacked are America’s.

Why cant 

A mother have sex-- and just as similar-- a daughter have sex

And not give it back to the earth. Why is the white house 

Being painted yellow with preforate St. John’s wort.

Why can’t I preach against the wrong without

spit sprinkled on my face.

Why do I feel shameful

Why am I disgusting in the eyes of a man

Now I feel disgusted by the sight of a man

I hurl my organs into a pile and stomp them dead into the floor

A sad attempt to sever my feminine bonds.

This is our undivine truth.

Are we as permanent as our errors or our pride?

Are we more pregnant with our errors or our pride?

Inyestermorn, we are drunk in our freedom,

A tangled intertwinement from finger to finger and toe to toe,

Conjuring our own petty religion and each naming it “me,”

We end where the restless oceans pound inside a dead woman’s bitter womb,

Moon marked and touched by sun,

Yet we still still reap the strings sown by dead women: croak, bell, Foote, and ada

Aid a mans patriarchy on accident 

Pumping their pride like insulin and shoot muscle through whatever,

In the streets, the books, to pimp, to read,

In these somber towns I am a tricky whisperer with a switchblade in my shoe that is

My voice, my thoughts, for example:

Let me say this quickly— I am sex 

As ink says to eyes and eyes say to hands

Let me say this slowly— I am not sex

As my mouth creaks when it opens

Just like a boy says to a pimp: 

Did he or did he not

Just like a man says to another man: 

I remember you was conflicted Misusing your influence

Just like a woman says to a pimp,

Are we as permanent as our errors or our pride?