Kavanaugh
India, one of the young women in LTAB the last few years, performed this poem, “Kavanaugh,” in her bout on Saturday and I asked her to share the text of it with me.
the spider stands trial and screams silk at the ghosts of all the girlhoods he stole. the spider council looks at the 56% of this spider and fly country that does not believe he should make decisions about more posthumous girlhoods and decides that his web is worthy of defining the most important opinion that can be had.
my mother comes into my room crying when they announce it and my mouth fills with corpses. I am nothing except everything she has told me of moments she won’t call rape. her two sons unbirth in her shaking skeleton and her two daughters are in every tear track and i feel so bitten, so caught, what is the world if not a web for me to trip over, to count all the ghost girls in my life and divide them by five to figure out exactly how much trauma each of my shattered teeth are worth. how much venom can I fit in that cracking bloodshed? how do i stuff my tongue full of all the poems I wrote out loud in the car and immediately forgot? my heart has been racing since i heard my first horror stories, full of ghosts and blood and girls that got cut into pieces on their way to school. that heavy knowing was the payment to walk home alone at 11 years old, to fear every slow-moving car, to run from the old men that shouted obscenities from porches when my best friend and i were barely the shadows of what might someday become women. in a way i hope we never do. that’s a heartbreak i don’t know if i can endure.
i have been holding my breath for seventeen years because i know it is safer to be quiet, always wear headphones on public transport with nothing playing in them, lock my car the moment i get in it when it’s dark out. there are no girls left in this world, only clenched fists. we are born clichés about destruction, born “femininity is a razor blade”, we are born wood to be whittled into Fuckable, into worthy of bruise and broken blood vessels. into art the spider would finally call beautiful, all black and blue and red, a bloody midnight. a rotten patriotism. my lungs are full of a decade and a half worth of stale secrets and air i know im not allowed to expel for fear of taking up too much space.
but why shouldn’t i breathe? why shouldn’t every stretch of my ribcage push poison into that beast, why does he deserve oxygen when all these ghosts are lungless? are loveless? why should i feel guilty for all this not-dying I am doing, for me. for all this venom coursing in my veins. for my mother. and for all of my mothers. bitten. standing. still here. still alive.
“Kavanaugh” by India W.
I’ll journal on it a little more later on.