Daughter

I'll teach my daughter

To bang on anything that makes a beat

She'll shake-a-boom, she'll quake a room

She'll paint her cheeks warrior-style, then smile

Beguile you, turn you inside out

Til your guts plead guilty.

She'll be built like a truck, built to work you down

As she works herself up

She'll make holes in the streets

In her ten inch spike heels,

In combat boots, stilts, on roller wheels,

She'll stroll through male pride

Amazon babes at her side.

She'll relinquish white privilege

Observe, be wise, she'll compromise

When the fire is stoked by other womyn's desires

But she'll never leave the flame.

All the same, she'll crave what makes her burn

She'll learn her cunt's good name-

The thick red lips, the small hot tip

No more of this cryptic shit.

This vagina will be known.

She'll park in all the wrong places,

Make faces at police cars,

Wind up behind bars, bust out big before serving her time,

Fingernails full of this grime we call

Reality,

She'll dig her way through.

She'll pick her nose when she has to,

She'll scratch her ass,

She'll be a crass medusa child

A wild healthy fiend

She'll live in all fonts and all sizes

Curly q's, caps, italics, and bold.

She'll fold airplanes out of shredded cosmos

And mademoiselles,

Then pilot them to never-say-never land

Where peter pan's gay and wendy's ok with it.

She'll wear thick braids, she'll shave her head,

She'll eat thick breads, she'll let her breasts flop,

She'll mop the floor like cinderella,

Then with rebellion- prowess,

She'll unionize daughters for a higher allowance.

She'll be male and female and in-between.

She'll preen, then crack her mirror, crack a beer

And watch love connection.

She'll go for days without taking a shower

Just to feel unchained ivory-slave power.

She'll want more than what she's 'entitled to'

She'll watch through

Nike commercials

And she'll just un-do it

Ask who's making that shit, who's breaking their backs

Keeping her breaking that

Glass ceiling.

She'll do all of this.

And she'll do none of this.

And it's funny how we hide behind these daughters,

Hide ahead of our own herstories

Scared of ourselves

Scared of the world

Scared of someone

Who made us

One way

Or another.

Well, this time around,

I'll be bound to my own mind womb

In my own birthing room,

I'll squeeze out, squeeze out

Each crimson thick belief

Then eat each pungent, sweet placenta

And relieved,

I will tear up this country's

"welcome to the world" certificate,

Tear off my father's father's father's father's name,

I'll legitimate my own entrance into a

Thinking existence

I will birth myself towards

Resistance.

But no frantic tick-tock of this biological clock.

On my own time, foremothers at my sides,

Sisters as midwives,

I'll cut my cord, head for that war

I will mother myself into my own grown daughter

And i will call myself a

Home-grown woman.