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Thank You, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Thank You, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There is a woman in me I never suspected.
She has been trying for years and years to peel
her way from behind the strangling pattern:
lolling heads and bulbous eyes.

She creeped and shook and smooched until
I finally got to her. The two of us
pulled off that last bit of paper and now she
can creep anywhere she wants, even in the garden
in broad daylight if it strikes her fancy.

Her fancy could and will I think
be most anything
from swigging chardonnay from a bottle in the middle of the lake to daring to be alone
in the dark
with herself and the owls and the skittish moonlight.
Never wondering what her mother would say.

I don’t have to be afraid anymore
of what might leak out of my pen, even
if it is pure pulsing blood.
If the reader can’t take it, that is her own darkness to bare.

I can just write on through the dark into the light, or not
on cloudy days, or sometimes in and out again
more times that I can count because
it is a dappled day. And dappled days are writing days too.

On writing days a woman can take in
her own beauty. She can
sip it,
snort it,
smoke it
or stick it right into a fat blue vein.

And when she gets brave,
she can swill it and roll in it like a sweet pink sow with teats
aplenty to feed a yard full of squealing sucklings.
And when the world has its fill at her breast, she can stroll
Unfettered,
Filled, among the stars
skipping neatly around Saturn to avoid disturbing her rings.

Kathy Godfrey

Western North Carolina Woman Magazine
WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA WOMAN
is a publication of INFINITE CIRCLES, INC.

PO BOX 1332 • MARS HILL NC 28754 • 828-689-2988

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