Girl

Girl says she’s feeling insecure Girl says she hates herself because roommate keeps losing weight and Girl isn’t but Girl isn’t gaining any either and I’m laughing now choking actually it's been a year since I wore clothes that didn’t feel like they were biting into my softness in another year, another girl starves the apple trees out of her chest because well, I’m laughing at myself I know enough discarded parts, landfills of hips and thighs enough
to call it contagious, to lose the vision of women, communities of fleshy girls with bony hearts, bony girls with fleshy hearts, enough to blanket the world twice, magazine computer lips and legs patchwork women selling clothes glossy on covers, too many hands in our mouths until we
collapse it’s sick a sick habit when Girl ignores someone asking for the nearest lighthouse because she thinks she's the only one that's scared of the shade her body makes the only girl who tries on clothes in an interrogation room, like she’s special the only girl stuck with a body that screams at her when she’s alone I just want to laughchoke on the scales in my throat, the ones that say Girl doesn’t get to complain because Girl wears my clothes like loose carcasses and they still look better on her because we were never supposed to think we were completely beautiful because if we did, god forbid, I could finally write about women becoming women instead of gutted fish. 

---

JOANNA GORDON

is a spoken word poet from the gentrified swamp lands of Hawaii Kai. She graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a degree in English and will pursue a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Western Washington this upcoming fall. Gordon is interested in topics of white privilege, mental illness, and feminism. She enjoys work that tells stories that are deeply honest and visceral.