It is the start of women’s history month and girls and women everywhere are quickly being reminded of our disposability. News outlets are reporting a missile strike on an all girls school, Shajareh Tayyebeh, in Minab, Iran. Casualties have yet to be confirmed, but nevertheless, the US-Israeli attack confirms what we have long known. Women and girls are disposable. This is evidenced by the long history of oppression we’ve face but also highlighted in recent event. The obvious sex trafficking ring discovered in the Episten Files, this bombing on a school of girls, and so much more. It is a maddening feeling, to know everywhere we go girls and women are not safe from the atrocities of men.
Femicide is gender-related killings against women and/or girls. It is a global crisis that shows no signs of slowing, but rather feels as though it is escalating for us women and girls. Even as more atrocities are revealed, the responses show further disregard for the impact on us physically and emotionally. Around the world, men remain the greatest threat to our safety, and they seem to relish the notion. Seek out the power to constrict, abuse, and murder us for their pleasure. None of us are safe. The modest, the promiscuous, the meek, the outspoken, it does not matter. Men determined to set us on fire will always find a reason, a way, and protection from it all.
A series of unfortunate events:
A woman is murdered by her boyfriend, and her body stored in their home basement
Another is shot while walking her three month old baby down the street
Another causally set ablaze, in New York, in Chicago, while riding a train
Another beaten and left for dead in the subway
The road, from girl to woman is blood soaked and burning coals
Sandalwood and smoke, torch lit by violence
Women will hold the fire with utmost care but
a flame is still a flame
and a man still a man
So we will still burn pretty anyway
I know a girl whose death is blooming in her belly
a woman writing her own obituary to the news
Making love to her undertaker & calling it holy
And I don’t know what’s worse
The anticipation or the act,
Hopelessly waiting for what always comes or the moment it finally finds you
But I know what it means to walk stiff & quivering the same
How unlucky we are to be born women, ill-fated from birth
in a world where men will label our deaths misfortunes before they ever call them murders
Femicide is too heavy a word for their feeble tongues
Even though their hands hold on to it like their last hope
Fear wafts through the streets
Caresses fists as if to soothe the punch before their landing
Power yearning for a place to penetrate
And what beautiful prey a soft thing makes
What a trophy to display of the hardening
How women will harden our hearts in attempts to protect our bodies
Become soldiers and sisters in arms on homeland to preserve our safety
Each of us become each others look out & back up plan
When a man uses rejection as reason to send us to a morgue.
I know a group of girls who’ve developed their own language to signal for help
Women, who’ve already crafted false names and numbers to ensure their escape
Who’ve tried developing apps to send warnings before the war finds us
And still the men will find us, and a way to infiltrate
Smoke us out, and into their arms to die ablaze
A flame is still a flame
And a man is still a man
And we women, are bound to burn pretty
anyway
LeChell Rush 