Poetry by Andrena Zawinski

Andrena is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, lives in Oakland, California and editor of http://www.poetrymagazine.com

Her website is http://www.poetrymagazine.com/zawinski

"We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want."
Tao Te Ching

THIS/SHE IS NOT

1.  This
(I am six.  I am twenty-six.)

I am six.
I am a kid
in a cowgirl suit,
strapping on a holster,
riding my city steed
cherry 3-wheeler,
clomps of mud
clogging its chain.
It has come to this:
I can barely remember
my own parents' faces,
but I can still see
mud on those pedals.

Twenty years later
I am on my back
a woman dressed up
as someone's bed,
blood on the sheets.
I am the bed,
I am the ceiling,
I am the walls,
I am the room.
(This has happened:
My face disappeared
beneath the scarlet
throb of a bruise.)

2. She is not
   (this body)


This is the world where only guns and drugs sell more than its whores,

rest and recreation for the global economy, its pedophiles reclined
behind a camoflauge of pc screens, eagerly scanning the rental lists

for a vagina    for a mouth     for an anus     for  for  for    by by
by the hour     by the day      by the month    for a lifetime   from

from the sexual slavery pimp, finger on the trigger of the cocked crack gun,
lolita posed like a CK ad , catalogued as a child bride ready-made to order,

but she is not this body.  This body is not a machine to sew jean seams
sweating over stitches in the flickering light bulb dark for a big buck bang.

This body is not the father's bed,  not a boot camp for the patriarchy.
This body is not a half-ripe cherry ready for the picker's claw.

This is not a good job for a poor girl.

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