I’m a small-town girl from a big damn city.
My mother sells overpriced, undercooked food for breakfast
to people who sell the poor, skin and bone,
over whiskey on imported dinner tables.
People like my father.
My grandmother, born when the 20th century was still learning to speak alphabets,
could never voice her opinions.
So I, her befitting 21st-century granddaughter,
peddle her struggles as mine,
because what good is pedigree
if you can’t inherit convenience?
Convenience is currency for the entitled.
And what good is entitlement
if you can’t package imagined sob stories
and sell them at twice the price?
But dare you call my bluff,
dare you question my bias dressed as fact,
dare you disagree with anything
I have already anointed as the only acceptable truth,
you’re a fucking monster.
I come from a state the country considers irrelevant,
so I learned early how not to be.
How to make my existence as visible as daily news.
I learned to camouflage as seasonal fruit;
different seasons, different selves,
because trading spines for for reptilian malleability is the only language
that passes for significance, in capitalist economies.
And when you don’t come from generational wealth,
and the only way to monetise your paper-rich education
is to preach disguised as teaching,
because that is all survival allows,
you learn something else.
You learn to intimidate what intimidates you.
And so I did.
And strangely, it works.
So I repeated it.
Like addicts repeat chemicals.
But dare you see through it,
dare you look past borrowed culture,
plagiarised intellect,
inflated certainty stitched together from necessity,
you become the abomination.
I tell people I am a doctor,
because truth alone does not carry prestige.
What good is a doctor who does not save lives;
only grinds herbs and plants into meaning,
calling approximation healing
because language forgives uncertainty?
I tell myself I am a poet,
and repeat it often enough
for repetition to resemble identity.
Because subtleties die easily
in the noise of mediocrity pretending to be volume.
And I have learned this much:
when you cannot convince them,
confuse them.
But do not mistake confusion for credibility.
The moment you hold up a mirror,
you stop being a storyteller
and become a fabrication under observation.
I am not defined by profession.
No one is,
until they have to justify themselves.
My teeth are stained in phallic hatred,
my gums reek of blood and testosterone,
from all the penises I've have rid men of,
my voice sharpened into argument
because softness never paid rent.
I find problems everywhere;
from my father's dentures to my mother's sarees.
I name them, shape them, expand them,
until even coincidence feels like conspiracy.
And I call that clarity.
I call it truth.
I call it survival refined into ideology.
But dare you call it what it is:
a carefully maintained illusion of authority,
and I will make sure I dismantle you
before you dismantle the story.
We are four sisters.
Of the many.
Of a sisterhood.
A sisterhood that swears to erase every place it enters
of men —
because men do not make good sisters,
and anything that does not make a good sister
is not inclusive, and must be misogyny.
A sisterhood that swears to reduce men to ash,
because we descend from the witches your patriarchy couldn’t burn.
Our grandmothers’ suffering is our inheritance,
and your grandfathers’ sins, your lineage.
So what if a century has passed?
So what if you had no hand in it?
We will burn the whole herd of you down anyway,
and from its ashes, we will build bricks.
Bricks for a sisterhood that sees nothing,
hears nothing,
says nothing,
except what it believes to be true today.
And dare you call it a facade, this revolution of ours,
we will rebirth you just so we can burn you again.
And when law enforcement finally arrives,
running awfully late, because old habits die hard,
we will call it proof of oppression.
And ourselves,
the martyrs of a forgotten history,
the lesser witches who were dead in skin but kept breathing in soul.
Welcome to sisterhood, Adolf.
