The thing that gets me is that sometimes people ask questions in the guise of getting to know you, but it’s clear they’re really just challenging you.

The thing that gets me is that sometimes people dismiss women’s poetry because it encompasses a whole range of human experience they just don’t have access to, and they feel that’s a threat to their perceived apexhood.

The thing that gets me is that I won’t ever stop adding poems like this to my April series until people no longer need to be educated about feminism, and not even then, because then everyone will just get it and the poems will be meaningful to them, too, and not just to some of us.

Why, look, it’s another poem I absolutely love!

I Am Not a Narrative for Your Entertainment

The male poet asks, Why are you single? What’s
the narrative? like I’m a show he’s been meaning
to catch up on. The male poet says, Remember  

the sexy poems you used to write? You’re not
writing mommy poems now, are you? I want
to tell him even my mommy poems are too sexy

for him, especially too sexy. I know because
the tongues that have flickered over my C-section
incision have told me. My abdomen, like Zeus’s

head, has sprung warriors. And if that’s not sexy
then nothing goddamned is. I want to tell him
I’m single because I’m a beautiful disaster.

Not the Little Match Girl but the whole fireworks
factory ablaze. You can watch me burn for miles,
hear about it on the national news. My every move

is a trending topic on Facebook and Twitter.
You just didn’t know because you’d been blocked
from my universe.

***

Shaindel Beers is author of the poetry collections A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Children’s War and Other Poems (Salt, 2013), and Secure Your Own Mask (White Pine Press, 2018). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, and serves as poetry editor of Contrary.