Feral Female

by Jenny Morelli

Shut up and stay still,

you fucking tease 

is the haunting taunt

I’ve lived with for years,

an unrelenting refrain

I’ve endured for decades.

Other words we women hear

as we walk a blurred line

Image credit: Anton Kotlovskii on Unsplash

when trying so hard

for our voices to be heard

are confidence and cocky,

assertive and bitchy.

Friendly becomes flirty 

becomes forward becomes tease 

and She asked for it

when we try to reel in

a runaway-train interaction

that’s going farther and faster

than we’re comfortable with.

The life of a woman

is one big misunderstanding

when it comes to men.

We spend our days

wading through a dense,

murky, muddy swamp

where men’s insults

cling to us like leeches,

where their epithets bite

like shark teeth and their arms

become strangling seaweed,

hands slippery eels sliding up

and down our bodies as we yell Stop! 

yell No! yell Fuck off, Asshole! 

But our voices

are never loud enough,

so we must use our other weapons,

must remember that the hand

covering our mouths is just skin,

soft skin we can penetrate with teeth,

with fingernails,

with the will to survive

and the power of the dormant,

determined feral female

inside us all.

***

Jenny Morelli

Jenny Morelli is a high school English teacher who lives in New Jersey with her husband and cat. She is often either inspired by her students or else they're triggering memories in her of when she was young and struggling with her self-confidence. She has been published in a number of literary magazines, including Spare Parts for a novel excerpt, Spillwords for several themed poems, and Bottlecap Press for her own chapbook This is Not a Drill.