Welcome To The Sisterhood

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 who was 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 monetize your paper-rich education

is to preach disguised as teaching, 

because that is all turncoats can afford, 

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 the borrowed culture,

the plagiarized intellect,

the inflated certainty stitched together from survival, 

you become the abomination.

We are two sisters.

Two 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.