On Being Treated Like Prey: A Gazelle Under the Gaze of Lions

Not the post I intended to publish

Yes, I know it’s an impala. Image by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay

Lately, I’ve been ‘doing feminism’ hard. Hell, it’s Women’s History Month, and it began with an International Women’s Day post that went a bit bonkers and got some negative attention from (just a few) men, so it's not surprising.

Plus, being compelled to insist that I’m not a second-class citizen is a lifelong passion of mine ever since I realised this patently stupid idea was currently/still a thing (aged about 4) and that I’d been born on the wrong side of it.

But there are consequences, peacewise and healthwise. I’ve been writing an essay knitting together a few key threads, and it’s not finished, and today I’m in pain. So instead of fighting to finish it and doing an inadequate job, I’m dropping you an unpublished poem from 2001.

I know; bold move. But it called to me, and when I read it, I realised it was speaking to some of the things that have been troubling me. This persistent sense that so many women have of living as gazelles under the gaze of lions.¹

Menopause has freed me from that burden; now, I only get the standard second-class-citizen treatment: men trying to tell me what to do, what to write, how to think; men insulting me, belittling me and patronising me (not in the literary way; that I am happy to accept). But gazelle-wise, yes, menopause is a Pause O’ Men (barring my husband, thank the god of good chocolate).

But the poem remains relevant for others. So, encouraged by the extraordinary response to The Year of Potatoes, I am dropping it here. My editor, Peter Jay, didn’t like it. Maybe you will.

The Single Woman Traveller, Latin America

England’s frostbitten fields laid out like circuit boards.
Ice-filled bomb craters, north of Leeds, 
write a long sentence to the coast, spelling out 
the O, O, O distress call of men at their own throats:
abandoned payloads of a long-past war
which had your mother, at six, dreaming bananas.

Silver seams of lights across the Southern States, 
the earth rumpled like fabric, make your flight 
the zig-zag mend of a woman’s knuckles,
a woman who hums to her porch as mosquitoes
fizz her children’s blood onto the glass of a bulb,
sticking there, like dropped stitches.

Your Spanish turns out to be useless.
At Arrivals, you side-step the locals, 
their wreck mock-taxis.The high-priced bar,
you discover, translates into brothel.
 Waiters don’t ask what you want to drink, 
but “¿Para tomar?”: for to take? 

Take care. The night is done up like a corset,
and kittens with prominent spines 
teeter, oblivious, over the gullies.
Take this language that falls apart under the tongue
like fruit dropped from a market stall
undressing itself beneath the moon’s glare.

Take the eyes of the Robert Mitchum lookalike
which sleep through his nightlies on the desk,
waking only to push up the hem of a passing dress.
A shift away, pregnant turtles reject the Atlantic
to oar up the black volcanic grit of the beach
and bury their futures: wet, delicate, out of reach.

1. I’m aware this metaphor is complicated by the fact that it is the lionesses who hunt. However, the males still get to eat the spoils. And other apex predators of the savannah just don’t work, poetically speaking (the sounds of their names). Nor in their habits; I very much need an apex predator who remains proudly (oh, the pride!) out in the open, in groups, not hidden.