I'm taking a breather from my work to write some nonsense.
On trying to describe a fortune cookie to non-English speaking bakery workers in broken Cantonese: "So... you know... those crackers... cookies... crackers?... that white people eat in... um... you know... Chinese restaurants... you open it like this (::makes breaking motions::) and then you get a paper that tells you stories..."
Man, I really miss Kati right now.
I was lugging a $45 bottle of vodka into my room and. Well, that's about it.
It's nothing new I know, but as I am writing my very first poem which directly confronts the vagina, I realized that common metaphors for the lady part are limited to flowers and not much else. Receptacles, second mouths, cut fruit. In biology, I learned that it was the sperm that penetrated the egg, and not that this egg was bigger than these squirming, desperate cells who needed this egg to live. The egg had the agency stripped from her; the sperm that breaks through is coined "special"- the existence of life is centered in this sperm's victory- how does it become that the egg's selective nature is more reflective of the sperm's superior quality rather than the egg's power to refuse and accept? So we get to use flowers for our parts- the delicate, seasonal, submissive- it is no wonder that when I try to write it, I can only imagine a speaker lying down on her back, receiving. And I'm conflicted because I can't seem to come up with any original metaphors of my own- something I chalk up to my own failure about societal perceptions of this part- like how I can't even say it without feeling oddly uncomfortable. Is this internalized shame? My own personal associations with sex, the body?
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