Don't Make Me Be a Woman

Michelle Ikejiani

you didn’t notice when you began to shrink, like blackened paper curling into itself. when you spoke, every sentence became a question; every sentence began with sorry: always asking for permission, always asking to exist, to take up space, to be enough woman

Alice in Wonderland

Isabella Baldwin

I tread softly on shifting stone or solid sand

With dream-like quickness and haze, Unable to focus on the details swooping by like angry swallows And disappearing again into the night.

I climb down into a cave whose shadows pulse and wait—

The cavernous space empty, until one tumbling sound Makes it echo with fullness, cramped need to escape, to uncurl these thoughts and bring them beyond the confines of my head— Out! And wild with nipping teeth and fitful feet I don’t know where I am, and I don’t see civilization, and these thoughts expand the air around me until I feel alone and as small as the coin in the gambler’s pocket: gone before I’m even there.

The air is tight and more alive than I am. Did you know that we are all living in the sky, submerged in millions of air particles?

It’s a wonder we don’t suffocate.

The skipping breeze, it taunts me in my haze, for I have not traveled so far nor seen so much as it has, And it whispers against my skin, Would it be so bad

To go mad, to forget the hard edges of the world, To renounce the masochism of responsibility and decorum, and submit oneself to the clumsy fingers of life and experience?

Artwork by Luca Cyr

What if we just endured, just enjoyed, just felt, just lived? Would it be so bad

To be stuck prisoner of my mind, To wander aimlessly among my thoughts, To explore without ever knowing, to live without dying, to die after living, to cry after feeling to feel without labeling The well the tears fall from?

And it says, Sip from the air

That drips with dreams and eternal youth; If only I can keep my eyes closed, Then I will never see the wrinkles etch age into my skin—

If my eyes just stopped seeing

And my ears just stopped hearing

And my lips just stopped mumbling through a peppermint smile … then I could see flowers that glisten with the tears of the man in the moon, hear songs in the lethargic ocean of the night, And impregnate my mind with a new world

So much greater than myself and the one I exist in.

I close my eyes against the stinging breeze: Carry me with you, invisible waves; Drown me in experience and beauty and things they can’t see.

But the wind does not listen to a young girl’s pleas, And time does not slow to preserve a dream, For in the end, we always wake up.

Artwork by Allie Cunningham