Maybe she’s born with it
Yamini Krishnan writes a poem about the plight of femininity in the contemporary patriarchal society.
Maybe she’s born with it,
Or maybe she wakes up every morning to the screech of war horns
and the gongs of her time running out,
Maybe the dark lines that encircle her revolver eyes
and the blood-crimson strokes she draws around her gunshot lips
feel like war paint,
Maybe they put on a show of courage on this battlefield.
Maybe she’s born with it,
Or maybe she looked at herself in the mirror one day,
And saw ridges rising on her forehead, small bumpy hills on the tip of her nose,
Maybe she was never taught how to appreciate the scenery.
Maybe she’s born with it,
Or maybe she was eleven, and it was a summer of cotton shorts and pastel tank tops,
And her sister snatched the football from her small hands,
Said that pretty girls shouldn’t go out into the sun like that,
Told her that the floppy-haired boy who sat behind her in class,
The one who played piano and had eyes the colour of melting ice cream,
Wouldn’t like her if she was too tanned.
Maybe she’s born with it
Or maybe her eyebrows are too curious, ask too many difficult questions,
questions that stand out of place
Questions no one has an answer to,
Maybe she raises her hand in class too often,
Maybe a string shaving off these question marks stretched above her eyes will make her less formidable.
Maybe she’s born with it,
Or maybe she’s sitting at a polished mahogany table at a tea party,
With her mother’s fuchsia smile sketched onto her face,
Her manicured nails grappling with the faint memory
of tennis racket fibre and sandcastle dust.
Maybe she’s born with it,
Or maybe she’s a cracked sculpture,
Concealer putting up a valiant effort to fill in the chasms,
Cherry rouge highlighting hypothetical happiness onto her cheeks,
Powder foundation settled over flesh rotting in misery.
Maybe she’s born with it.
Maybe she isn’t.
Maybe she never wanted to be.
Yamini Krishnan is a sixteen year old from Pune. She’s a raging feminist who enjoys reading, writing and scrolling through existentialist meme pages on Facebook.
