by Molly Likovich
You’re not like other girls. Yes
I am. I just don’t understand this
sentence. I am like other girls. I have
a vagina, a vulva, a womb to grow and breasts
to nurture. I am just
like other girls. I bleed from my vagina and I spend
too much money on conditioner
for hair so long–it comes off
in fleeting strands across my home
like tufts of dandelion fluff in a summer
field. I am like
all other women, exactly. We know
when the moon is full and when someone needs
chocolate. We know which shade of lip
stick will look perfect on Kathryn
which dress on Ginny. We’ve braided
our mother’s hair, and stayed
on the phone till the sun
to explain the intricacies
of the universe to a loved one. We know
who’s on the other
end of the phone before it rings. We know when
we missed our turn and need to put on the GPS. We know
when our babies bleed out of us in chunks. We know when
we bleed out of ourselves in wrangled messes.
I am just like all these queens on a battlefield after a war
just won by going to the grocery store
without a list and remembering which milk
to get anyway. These women I call
mother, sister, friend–maybe one
day daughter–I am just
like them. You expect me to be
flattered by the idea that the only way I can
be beautiful, is if all the rest
of them are ugly. I am other girls. Our bodies
are temples and we are the gods no matter how
many cocks think our thighs are
the door to a cheap motel. I am like
these girls. We bleed, and milk, and life comes
from our wetness. What could be more
holy than that? Even with a penis, I am
like her. And she is me. We
both know the power in the earth and can see.
Even if a woman cannot grow
a human in her, I am
like her. We still know
to carry ibuprofen in our purses,
and compliment another woman’s shoes.
You say I’m beautiful and different. An enigma, because I’m not
like other girls. I remember being
sixteen, standing on a sink in a public bathroom, at a Taylor
Swift concert, my period rushing down my shins
in drips and streams and shouting: DOES ANYONE HAVE
A TAMPON? Dozens of hands shooting into the air.
It was simple.
It was
saving. It was beautiful.
They didn’t know
me. They didn’t want anything
from me. They just knew that I was
them. Tampons in gripping fingers, we laughed
like old friends about all the underwear mother ruined. We were
all bloody and ugly together. And there
is nothing else.
Molly Likovich is about to graduate from Salisbury University with a BA in English-Creative Writing, she has poetry forthcoming or published in journals such as Blustem, Red Paint Hill, Rust+Moth, Germ Magazine, and The Scarab. She has written four novels, and hopes to get her most recent one published in the next few years. She does slam poetry on YouTube to an audience of over 1.6k subscribers. She has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Award for her poem “Beste.” You can find her online @magicalmolly, on all platforms (twitter, IG, YouTube).