"brittled" poems - Hello Poetry

The inadequate bookshelf that sat near the door that my sister used to call her own was mostly made up of adolescent reads, books better suited for preteen girls rather than intellectually budding young ladies— juvenile vocabularies and simple, non-complex plot lines do little to craft and create worldly, knowledgeable women. I thought I must spring clean the naiveté away and replace it with the works of great authors like Sylvia Plath Simone de Beauvoir Virginia Woolf Margaret Atwood Betty Friedan; ingenious femme fatales that cut down to the brittled bones of the misogynists and burned their marrow along with the ashes of bras and aprons and 350 degree oven heat. Growing up, to me, seemed like a wonderful epiphany chock-full of ideas and opinions and clever, ironic remarks that chased satirical witticisms like felines to rodents and wolves to deer— being an adult would guarantee me a say, a vote prior 1920’s America play dress up as a suffragette women’s rights femininity personified by dolls in plastic houses. To be eighteen-years-old, the goal, the legality, the bright light at the end of the tunnel; the official womanhood it would bestow upon me seemed like something almost tangible with the way that it loomed over my head. Get good marks graduate high school travel back in time sixty years meet a nice boy become a “good wife” have dinner ready by five bear two beautiful heirs clean up the messes left in the kitchen fast-forward to the twenty-first century go to a good college find a stable career settle down if the fancy strikes you live non-docile and full of passion— the parallelism of times are severely di lap i dat ed. 1950’s America would never be a home for me because I am much too wild to be contained.

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Oct 14, 2013

Oct 14, 2013 at 12:12 AM UTC

taylor-st-onge

Exemplar

The inadequate bookshelf that sat near the door that my sister used to call her own was mostly made up of adolescent reads, books better suited for preteen girls rather than intellectually budding young ladies— juvenile vocabularies and simple, non-complex plot lines do little to craft and create worldly, knowledgeable women. I thought I must spring clean the naiveté away and replace it with the works of great authors like Sylvia Plath Simone de Beauvoir Virginia Woolf Margaret Atwood Betty Friedan; ingenious femme fatales that cut down to the brittled bones of the misogynists and burned their marrow along with the ashes of bras and aprons and 350 degree oven heat. Growing up, to me, seemed like a wonderful epiphany chock-full of ideas and opinions and clever, ironic remarks that chased satirical witticisms like felines to rodents and wolves to deer— being an adult would guarantee me a say, a vote prior 1920’s America play dress up as a suffragette women’s rights femininity personified by dolls in plastic houses. To be eighteen-years-old, the goal, the legality, the bright light at the end of the tunnel; the official womanhood it would bestow upon me seemed like something almost tangible with the way that it loomed over my head. Get good marks graduate high school travel back in time sixty years meet a nice boy become a “good wife” have dinner ready by five bear two beautiful heirs clean up the messes left in the kitchen fast-forward to the twenty-first century go to a good college find a stable career settle down if the fancy strikes you live non-docile and full of passion— the parallelism of times are severely di lap i dat ed. 1950’s America would never be a home for me because I am much too wild to be contained.