We’re not big on security here.
Our edges are torn unclean.
Our toes are jammed full of the earth we’ve trudged —
the clammy swampy river and the soft hot sand.
Our fingernails are torn and ripped where we have,
against all Glamour and Vogue advice,
used them as tools for
scraping one thing off another
and picking boogers from noses.
We are pungent with our effort,
ripe and fecund,
we are constantly in a state of decomposition
and recomposition.
We don’t think your perfection is pretty —
we find it dumb and useless.
Like ceramic tchotchke.
Your perfume makes our eyes water and our lungs scream.
We prefer the smell of hard work and lived experience.
If only you’d be willing to dirty up your hands.
Surely, if you knew the feel of clayed earth between your fingers,
you would never get another manicure with those weird fake nails.
But you are the secured people.
Tethered.
Like animals, owned.
We’re not so big on security here.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2012
About This Poem
When I wrote this, I didn’t quite notice the kind of sneer towards more manicured women that was embedded within it — which is so obvious now. I was writing about myself. There was a much younger version of me who worked hard at fitting into a femininity that was never actually mine, but that’s where that younger me thought she’d find love, acceptance, wantedness. It took shaving my head and not shaving my body and a lot of other practices to find out what it meant to be real.
I wrote that fourteen years ago, and I wasn’t really aware that I was still exiling that twenty-year-old who was just so hungry to be chosen. And that judgment towards more manicured women was really a lack of compassion towards that younger me that other parts of me were embarrassed by.
And while at sixty-one I feel my me-ness and my genderfluidity as good and right, and know my femininity (and masculinity) from the inside out, I am also still living in the soup of a world that says “this is what it means to be a woman.” And I am definitely not that.