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amongst the tall, overgrown grass of white feminist rants and just hovering above the dirt crawling with earthworms so thick and dense sits a thought i have been cultivating over my 22 years on earth. 

i want to say that it’s a heavy fog, light while still rendering you sightless in this tall grass that we find ourselves in, and that would work well in another version of this thought, but it has legs. i’m almost sure that it has legs. it’s not as large and affronting as a tiger, but we’re getting there. maybe it’s a snake, intelligent and complicated, friendly but angry, and often met with fear. 

this thought has to do with womanhood. i believe that womanhood is very wild. i believe it falls in a category that sits comfortably between swords used thousands of years ago and the bands that played music during the civil war. womanhood is so shockingly perfect. like violence. a kind of wild that is uncontrollable and moves like wildfire that dances wherever it can catch. again, it’s feared, for if it becomes too powerful it could become a weapon, or something like one. 

womanhood holds a tether to nature. we grow humans in our wombs and bring them into this world with blood and screaming and crying and rage. 

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A Mermaid

Painting by John William Waterhouse

Date: 1900

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ben shahn, “i never dared to dream,” 1960

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Gustav Klimt Water Serpents II 1907

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John Cimon Warburg - View of Sea, 1909

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it was may and there was electricity in the air. it could have made all the hairs on your body stand up. it was aggressive and choppy, it felt like it could change directions at any moment, and it was everlasting through the month. i was about to graduate college and leave the place that i’d spent 4 years making a home for myself in. i knew her corners, her back alleys, her ugly and her dazzling, and i’d grown to love her dearly even though she sometimes made me feel all wound up and twisted inside. 

she was an ugly mess too, she was very unlovable, and i’d spent a lot of time wondering why someone would choose to lay roots down in her infertile soil. it’s a choice i had made with the safe and warm embrace of the university borders in mind. they lulled me into a false sense of security. but it was alright. false as it may have been it was my genuine belief that i was safe. and suddenly it didn’t seem to matter whether or not i actually was. 

everything was so fleeting and days started to feel like minutes. it felt as though i was rushing to hold on to everything but it so quickly all went flying around me in a gust of uncontrollable wind. and as it hovered above me things whizzed so rapidly through the air that i couldn’t possibly obtain any singleness of focus. 

and this lasted for a very long time. but on this one day in early may i felt a quiet emptiness that i had been craving for so long. i struggle to admit that i found it in a person, unspecial and ridiculously normal. it’s odd to say that feeling empty was desirable to me, but life became so complex and horrid and impossible to tame or deal with that emptiness felt like a sort of peace. 

he was tall and simple. we went to the park before sunset and we spoke about nonsense for hours. but in the end i layed on his chest and we were silent as the breeze became cold and the sun went behind the trees. when he kissed me, it was like two frayed live wires were sparking. not because of him but because it was warm and quite positively overwhelming. rows of people gathered on the grass to watch the sunset sat behind us, and it was hard to tell if we were visible to them. it stopped mattering to us rapidly. 

the next time i saw him was even more chaotic. my entire family was in town for graduation, and i drove my packed car to the parking lot by the drained pool to meet him. it felt necessary to my sanity to see him. we made out in the backseat of his car and he held me. he held me for a while and i was quiet and rested my head on his shoulder. we were both quite sarcastic and aggressive in nature but we were still. he knew that i needed him to be still for me. we breathed into each other and sat silently for a bit. he whispered to me to ask if i was okay. i had never heard him be so soft. i had never known him to be concerned if i was alright. something about my sad heart had touched his sad heart, though buried under layers of defense mechanisms that made him rather unpleasant to be around otherwise. 

he left hickies on my neck and chest and i wore them to graduation the next day. 

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poems “never to heaven” and “past the bushes cypress thriving” by lana del rey. from book “violet bent backwards over the grass”.

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Marilyn Monroe photographed by George Barris, 1962.

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Electrick Children (2012)

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Gustav Klimt - The Kiss (animated)

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stox restaurant.  downey, california. 

october 2021

© tag christof

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🍓Grandma’s Strawberry Candy🍬