femme rage: an incomplete canto
Anger is a privilege of the truly broken, and yet I’ve never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry. – Roxane Gay
is this a game you wanna play with me you want me crazy? i’ll show you crazy. now, if any of you sons of bitches, got anything to say, now’s the fucking time! you wish i was different? so do i! you fucking hate me? so do i! what the fuck else am i suppose to do? what the fuck is going on inside my head? this mutha fucker is psychotic. bet you there’s serial killers less anal…
oh my god, are you kidding me where do you think i learned all this shit from? you’re the muthafuckin improper influence. this girl is the nastiest skank bitch, i have ever met. do not trust her. she is a fugly slut. don’t you swear at me you little shit. don’t you ever raise your voice at me…
suck my dick! it was my life. my life! you don’t get to take that from me! hell i work my ass off… i need you to be the fucking background to my foreground… but i got the voice! please, i’m a star! the whole world is gonna know my name. and i work like a dog, day and night, living off of coffee from a pot none of you wanna touch. and i’m not bitter, i’m mad as hell… i put myself through fucking hell for you!
you greedy selfish son of a bitch. get out of my house. until you do right by me, everything you think about is gonna fail. murder me like you murdered my mother! guilty? guilty? you’re supposed to trust me. i am your mother! i am your wife, …and you never even said, “i’m sorry.”
Editor’s Note:
femme rage; an incomplete cento is composed of language scavenged from infamous cinematic lines/movies, where femme characters are expressing divine rage. such examples include, Janet Jackson, Patricia (Why Did I Get Married Too?), Lucy Lui, O-Ren Ishii (Kill Bill), Zendaya, Rue Bennet (Euphoria), Winona Ryder, Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted), Angela Bassett, Bernadine (Waiting to Exhale), Mia Goth, Pearl, (Pearl), Taraji P. Henson, Catherine (Hidden Figures), Kimberly Elise, Helen McCarter (Diary of a Mad Black Woman), Evan Rachel Wood, Tracy (Thirteen), Rachel McAdams, Regina George (Mean Girls), Margot Robbie, Tonya Harding (I, Tonya), Florence Pugh, Alice (Don’t Worry Darling), Dominique Swain, Lolita (Lolita), Toni Collette, Annie Gram (Hereditary), Jennifer Connley, Marion Silver (Requiem for a Dream), Whoopie Goldberg, Ciely (The Color Purple), Beyoncé, Sharon Charles (Obsessed), Jennifer Hudson, Effie (Dreamgirls).
finessing is not scamming
1. and what they won’t tell you is that half of it is yours. buried somewhere under a long thick quilt. fire, sooted exasperating under its wetness. tongues and cowlicks on the edge of a baby’s head somewhere, came out of you, and bore its own milk. and the cow they stole put its bare back in your spleen and greased the corners of your face. as soon as your grandparents come howlin’ from the south, full of empty whiskey necks and two dolla stories they would carve outta wood and ambition. and they marry young until things can seem just about enough right. and despite all the hell it could be, it’s just a long line of distresses and raw materials preserved like green beans in your first new apartment, despite your lack of credit.
2. it was never intended to be a move. fantasized by slot machines and jacking letters. running numbers behind eyelids and caspering away on pieces of paper, chewed like bubblegum. spat out into the ear of some horseman or jockey, as they toast their tobacco in a raised bed of sand. swallowing their wives names in between smoke pitches. later to become taykays and brilliant engineer men. postal coding and attaching machines made to be track stars and electric codes of copy. a self-made franchise, guarded by a basement and perhaps a vpn, setting location to your nearest gas station, bp, and family dollar. the only way to ensure a purchase was ran.
3. we’re always “just doing our best.” sometimes others’ “best” is just better. they share the better parts of their day over a three-course dinner, carved and split around a barn wood table. when the “best is the worst,” the best must be taken from, and it’s never meant to hurt. it’s the system! where do they think their fine china comes from? the one that’s made out of yt paste and colosseums. or at least a paint job. coated in wax. an oval bowl tossing incorporated fruit. jaspers and coppers and colbats and discord and courtrooms ballets. piet pierced picket lined truths for political footballs and principles. our bodies, a forced massacre through their preservatives, phosphates, and gods. your healthcare and lack thereof. the fucking water. a couple dollas won’t hurt, that they will get back.
4. this isn’t to tempt you. my daddy in a well-lit sleep and would tell me about the ways a person can become beautiful in themselves. like they just may have came from riches or something. and how there is always a way to develop truth even when it’s been hidden to the naked eye. and sometimes, there are men who want the naked eye, and i say to myself, how much of me is hidden. i show just enough of what i don’t know, over his drink, through a smokey eye glaze, as we comment on neck ties and ballrooms and fragrances. perhaps there is something i can get from him like a business card or game, as he runs an allowance through the corner pocket of a napkin, slides his hand into a chance of everything. something forbidden like a lost loved jazz song in the center of your pelvis on a full moon as you hurt home behind your door, attached to your vanity. and you say good job on getting a bill paid.
a pair (two odes)
yt girl
boobs
sit up straight
hold their own
pepperonis
two vanilla scoops
shaved ice un-syruped
pointing at the sun
full circles
the parties’ balloons
rose buds
bouncing
heirloom tea cups
snow hills
a planned trip
blk girl
titties
sag and slouched
split since birth
hershey’s kisses
broken waffle cones
grape koolaid splashing
drowning with the moon
long ovals
the afterparty deflation
petals
running
mamas coffee mugs
mud slides
a journey unseen
About the author: E’mon Lauren was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Her work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism”. She is an artist and educator from the Wes and Souf side of Chicago. E’mon currently holds curative and operation direction at #LetUsBreathe Collective‘s #BreathingRoom Space, where she curates and leads transformative and artistic programming. She has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Her work has appeared in the BreakBeat Poets Anthology series, Volumes 1 & 2, Poetry Foundation Magazine, The Reader, South Side Weekly and elsewhere. She is host of her hit talk show, “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago,” produced by her production company, BlkHoneyBun Productions. Her first chapbook of poems COMMANDO was published by Haymarket Books in 2016.
About the illustrator: kee ‘brun’ mabin(kee is an individual that has had their name legally changed with the assistance of the Transformative Justice Law Project) is a collagist working within sound,printmaking,ephemera, and mixed media. kee is the founder behind projects such as Black Matriarch Archive/, Homagetoblkmadonnas(now acquired by Black Beauty Archives),and crunk music archive(now an ongoing collaboration with Georgia State University/Atlanta Hip Hop Archives). kee’s work explores themes of memory work, afrofuturism, queerness, intersectionality and narratives around the black diaspora.
