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Blazing Stink of an August Sidewalk

Blazing stink of an august sidewalk. My fingers my eyeballs are grey with the newsprint of this morning’s sins and a heavy shamed sickness knowing I am born with Certain Inalienable Rights: to have legs. To speak read write words on a page to love without fearing the circle of empty faces bodies hating reasonless shoulder to shoulder, sure in blamelessness hands grope for stones. Would they break my glasses first? Or my breasts, badge of my station, proof in the flesh of my wickedness. The fashion models have blood in their hair.

They told me I was my own to give or not. They loosed my foremothers from their ovens handed them ballots and birth control But I was created unequal The girls who I was not born learn to cast their eyes down and walk feeling the catch and drag of invisible shackles on their ankles And when the light tells me to walk I feel it too.

And the girls on the newsstand have the eyes of dead things



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