A Woman Wants What A Woman Wants
The alarm goes off and I wake up
to perform my critically acclaimed
sentience in my morning posture
I seek to achieve the impossible angles of a bird
lying dead in the road - with its head and wings
folded down into the asphalt from the vantage point
of a crane shot.
To make direct eye contact
with the camera is to move the perspective from
the watched to the watcher or to present an emotion
as a publicly observable signifier,
a voyeuristic experience -
The Feel Good Movie of the Year
was my nickname in high school
and as is cinematically compelling,
I brush my teeth for he duration of sand
moving from the top of the blue plastic hourglass
to the bottom. “Look at this existence.
This pathetic, fallible, wonderful body,"
you can say rhetorically, sarcastically, or earnestly
and still achieve death.
Look at me falling in love with fallible bodies.
Look at me performing emotional labor,
my arms are strong enough
to work a tract of land:
The impatient man calls me
a bitch at my place of work
and the upward movement
of my facial muscles causes
my eyes to wrinkle, a smile.
This is a method of intention setting.
I seek a husband
with broad shoulders and a symmetrical face,
a hard worker, whose value is in the width
of his chest. I do not want
men that can teach me. There is nothing
more that I want to know; free of want,
I can’t use men in the same way
that they can use me. “Give up
on art and love," you can say rhetorically,
sarcastically, or earnestly, and still achieve death.
I wouldn’t be a good wife,
but I would be a wife
in a way that was cinematically compelling.
In my dream last night
there was a factory farm
that performed full body castration;
I went there
to lay with the women who wanted
to find a calm somewhere.
I became a body
and my sentience became someone else’s
problem as I awoke thinking,
“Where is my value?" as if I had misplaced
my lipstick again.
(from Gabby Bess, Alone with Other People. Read more here: http://gabbybess.com/selectedwriting)
May 24th, 2017
