Let’s Be Monsters

Let’s be monsters.
Let’s be witches and bitches
and crones
and just
hideous.

Let’s be powerful.
Let’s take and take and take
and grab the world,
just
fucking hold on with claws
and teeth
and refuse to let go.

And let’s be gluttonous.
Let’s devour.
Let’s see what we want,
what delights us,
and let’s inhale it with no
regard for propriety.
With no regard for you.

Let’s be insolent.
Let’s be wanton.
Let’s be ugly.
Let’s show our teeth as a warning sign
before we sink them into your neck.
Let’s be savage and angry.

Let’s say,
This is for me.
This is because I want.
This is because I exist.
This is because I take up space,
as much as I want, and more,
and I survive despite your best efforts
to tamp me down,
and I will fucking wear my defiance
like a punch to the gut
or—

Go ahead. Tell me
the red on my lips is too
suggestive. It’s my
fucking mouth. And I use it to
bite more than anything else.

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Maia Brown-Jackson is a Pushcart-nominated, award-winning writer whose second poetry collection, Gifted, opens for pre-orders this autumn with Nymeria Publishing. In her spare time, she volunteers with a Yazidi NGO, accidentally starts studying quantum physics because several hours ago she looked up the qualities of neutrinos for a poem, and wastes time with the world’s sweetest, clumsiest cat.

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This poem previously appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review.