I am busy with the #1000wordsofsummer project these days – thank you so much, Jami Attenberg; the motivation is incredible and I’m at more than 13,000 words on Day 8 – but I just found a poem that I wrote at some point when my child was a baby and thought I’d share it. To be clear, I am not at all feeling this way right now, when it’s not quite 6:00 in the morning and I’m pretty peaceful overall, but sometimes I do feel this way and I know lots of women who sometimes/often feel this way.
The fact that I needed to write that – don’t worry, I’m not feeling this way right now – speaks to the urgency with which we should start transforming the feeling of anger from something negative to something necessary, even helpful. In the meantime, happy Sunday. Or productive Sunday. Or angry Sunday. Or whatever Sunday.
Go smash a plate against a tree, if you need to.
I ate an apple and
threw it over the fence as
hard as I could because
I am angry but I do not
know how to be angry
because I am a girl raised
in a world that says shh
shh shh shh shh to
girl anger because it is
not always pretty or
kind or slim.
The apple didn’t make it.
And I want more things
to throw.
