They Went Shopping for Feminism Without Me

By ying xu

For anything that ails ------

pussy hats, pins of vulvae

girl power crop tops, chants of the future

as female

tale-telling in their message

and sparse in their availability

for me

For anything that sells ------

red bottoms, crop tops that morph

existence into resistance

confident in a way that feels easy

when equity

is only checked out

by people who were conscious of barriers

but afraid to knock them down

for me

For anything that shines ------

sharpies for my signs, pink glow sticks

that are bent into the shape of

peace signs

disregarding the violence that do not touch them

that sheds light around the corner

that shows its face

for me

Have you noticed that this poem

is following a pattern

enlarging micro-monologues into slogans

that only made sense

to those were deemed powerful enough to be empowered

and worthy enough to redefine words

instead of eliminating them

for me

--- for anyone who must bend over backward

a few more degrees

to swing the bat and hit the ball

to create a line, a noisy one

between what needed fixing

and the things that demanded erasure

but when they went shopping for feminism

I could not go with them

because I knew that poems followed patterns

that poets intended for them to have

& our resistance is monolingual

until the cycle of violence is broken

not by the ones that survive

but the ones that can’t