My Girls

My girls are Iron

Earth-born.

Blazing trails of fire and glass.

Trebuchets who, with one shot, a single look will leave smoke where you stand.

They rise out of marches towards suffrage,

Tread through waves of Roe V Wade.

Ascend rocky cliff faces, bursting through ceilings, standing on the shoulders of giants.

Then abseil deep down into unexplored caverns to start movements, not moments.

My girls are tough.

Raw and ready, hustlers and thinkers

Who put on their blinkers to pretend the threat isn’t there right now.

Because at 3pm in the afternoon they’re just trying to get to the coffee machine before this report is due and no, your hand does not have to be there. Or anywhere on her body she did not sanction.

When we say ‘get home safe’ we actually mean it

Because I know where each of them lives,

I can picture their houses full of individual intricacies, like bread crumbs of their existence scattered across their lands.

They’re Queens of their castle.

But there’s a very real chance that when the lights go out, they might not make it back.

Safely.

They walk home

with make-shift knuckle dusters made out of keys.

One ear to the music, the other to the street.

Senses up, eyes alert, feet grounded and ready.

For anything.

Finding their light in the streetlamp-spotlights,

Walking cool, confident, but at any moment can break into a run

They hold out their phone and I cling to mine

and my breath is in my throat until

I get the text confirming they’re through the door

and a lock now keeps them safe.

My girls are humour and warmth.

Laughter and moonlight,

full, so full of energy and radiance that sometimes, in their presence I think the whole room might burst!

They sing songs of sirens,

Of futility and frustration.

Their words cascade in whispers,

spoken and written, all sweeping through us in the growing, roaring wind.

Our improvised anthems.

To wear, or not to wear

How they cover or wear their hair

The choice is theirs.

As is the right to stand proud on home soil.

The women who battle through grief,

Fight to be heard around the office table,

Push for representation, reality.

Who absorb the shock of unwanted affections,

Of repeatedly pummelling wombs,

Skewed words rattling around in their heads,

Biting back the weight of the air

Force-choking them to the ground.

The women who give everyone the right to choose,

and know that it shouldn’t mean a life for a life,

But on their sad days, it can feel that heavy.

They get up,

work 12hr days and bleed through it,

Convinced by the story-books of his-story that that is what makes them ‘human’.

Superhuman.

I wanna hear Her-story.