To The Women/s: A Poetic Letter/Plea at the Horizons of Feminist & Continental Philosophy

Some of you have more to say now. 

Others look away with greater judgement and speed than before.

Still others drop off gifts, quietly, sometimes anonymously--

gifts color-coded, gifts cloaked in generational grind. 

Yet another group of you can't look at me without crying

because images of your abortions, miscarriages, 

your torturous waiting that turned into a never,
that he left you for some vagina-that-could,

come flooding every time my engorged belly passes by.

Little girl creatures stare and stare and stare:

as if I'm some new constellation in the sky, 

begging for a name and mythology all my own.

The oldest, those closest to death

say things so unfiltered, it's almost refreshing. Almost.

New tongues and traditions between us 
and though I am delighted, I have something to say:

I see you. 

I see it all. 

But I saw you before, too. 

Do you know that? 

Before you began applying the universal woman/mother hermeneutic upon my flesh,

before you tiptoed through the entrance of a 'tolerable' discourse 

in this culture that tries to annihilate anything authentic and creative between-women
outside of its Cosmopolitan, Better-Homes-and-Gardens, Madonna/Whore jurisdictions-- 

I yearned for you.
Yearned for your speech, 
your glances and judgements, 
your quiet and anonymous gifts, 
your tears. 

I've wanted to see/hear/touch/love all of you all along. Not just about this. 

Not just about the labor of our love externalized, as Irigaray would say. 

But about the labor of y/our interiority too.

Your questions, desires, and mad-ass plans to do it different,

the burning shame you hold because of too many nevers,

the way you touch yourself when the loneliness has become too stifling,

the way you make sense, the way you become incensed.

The books that burst you into belly laughter.

Why you cry in church like that.

Your stories and songs outside the obligatory and caved-in.

I've wanted all of you, all along. 

I do not confess my longing,
as the framers of autocratic/phallic/fuckery would propose,
from a location of hyper-feminine, dyked-out insatiability.
This is not a petition of one who wears black leather, fish nets and red lipstick.
Does anyone else yawn in the face of such simplicity? 
These are the yearnings of one who occasionally
glimpses the "one" we are not because of the dynamic, difference we are.
And it sets me free. Not to be you. But to be me, and in being totally me,
the possibility to love you, to love the ineffable us, which is 
after all the greatest gift I can give this unborn daughter
coming into our fold, a line of flight her very own.