A Collection of Poems

By Marla Adams
1) Living-In-A-Shadow
Im struggling to find myself,
Who am I?
Constantly
Constantly I feel as though Im solely defined by my completed actions
Let's see? What is on my EVERYDAY-to-do-list?
1)Take orders, be quiet
2)Wear a dress
3)Be Married
4)With children
5)Tend to the House
What exactly makes these things so difficult?
Am I right to assume, since men cant do them, that they are painstakingly hard
For those with testosterone to master?
And why are my womanly-duties,
My living-in-a-shadow of a man whom I answer to instead of myselfHow are these tasks
So hard for a man to?
And is it so hard for a woman to do as her husband does?
Wearing pants (Because that is a male privilege apparently)
Married (Begrudgingly, right boys? ha ha ha)
With children (Whom I do not birth or participate in the birth for)
Working (Again, something only a man can do)
I am bound by this marriage
In a different way than he is.
He leaves our marriage everyday,
He just has the freedom (To leave).
When he walks out the door
Returning for his dinner and his drink
I
Chosen, based on my PARTS
To be confined to the house
To our marriage
Our children
Cooking cleaning PREPARING
For the return of someone who dare thinks
I cant even do my job? (The kid doesn't have a fucking fever)
Who am I? If my work at home isnt even considered work?
If I am just a feminine face
With child bearing capabilities?

2) Sexism: Who Started It?

And was it
Even Mans fault
That I am beneath them?
When these trends
Of disrespect, rape and entitlement
Became
Why didnt we fight back?
Why didnt women defend each other?
Why didn't we collapse these new ideas?
Why did we support the battering of other women just to save our own asses?
Why
Do we question men now with such anger?
To try and destroy them as if they themselves
Invented the patriarchy
No one man created these set of rules putting the male genitalia above womens
So why do we expect just a few of them to save us all?
And why does the media use its power for
Male evil?
The male gaze is about the only gaze we see through professionally
And then we wonder why other women wear merchandise with the make believe word
MENINIST
Who do we believe if what we think is unbiased
Is completely opposite
Which brings me to my original thought,
Who let this whirlwind of phallocentric culture begin?
Who watered these ideas?
And who stayed silent as they watched these ideas flourish and bloom into the ugly vines
that were woven so tightly around our society that feminism has been separated from
equality?
Who can I blame?
Is it even a who?
Is it not the entity that gave me breasts and the man beside me testicles?
The answer to all of these questions isnt an answer but a callingWho gives a fuck.
Who started these microaggressions faced by female-identifying people?
We are on the road to an oppression-free household
But only with the help of allies
Will we end what we cant even pinpoint the start of?

3) In Our Nature
We are not giving trees,
We are not to be planted and expected to bear all of our fruit
Because others expect it.
Women give so much of themselves to others,
We house life in our bodies
We subject ourselves to danger for others
We marry and give birth for others
And though some enjoy these expectations,.
Giving is what gives them life.
But we are each our own tree
With each of our own rings, roots and species
We cant be expected to conform to
A role
That transcends gender
Whether or not you bear fruit in the spring
Women can be anything a man can be
and because not only are women harmed by these roles,
Men can be anything women can be.
Boys can have feelings
Boys can wear dresses
Boys can be the homemaker
Boys can mother
Boys can want to be married
Boys can be what girls can be
Boys arent only just being boys
Boys are harboring damage from these stereotypes
Just like girls
Boys are not the farmers they do not own the land and they cannot buy us from our place
and mold us,
All genders are natural.
We all avoid being tamed.
In all of us,
We have roots to our earth.
Why cant we just embrace our place?
We all have belonging
We don't belong in lanes
We cannot be locked up in these traditionsTraditions arent just how we spend the holidays kissing under hemiparasitic plants,
Its how we ingrained strict rules for expression upon a society that cant conform to them
in a healthy way.

Backing these stereotypes would be a waste of oxygen.

4) I am not your flower

They want to call me flower
They want to call me finicky and difficult to look after
They want to tell me that I should be this color
This bright, this pretty, this gifted.
But they also choose to immobile me,
Pluck me from my freedom
And plant me in a bland pot.
They ration what I accumulate
They choose when I can grow and how
They want to pick on me for the way my petals look
The strength of my stem
They want to put me on display but they also want to cut my leaves off
If they grow in the wrong direction
They depend on me for survival
They depend on me
And yet they only compare me to my harvest
As if I do not matter in any other way
As if my incredibility is not strong enough unless you see me bloom,
And to that I say
I am not defined by my species and I do not belong in anyones garden
So de-fucking-flower me
Because I am not your source of oxygen anymore
5) Colors
Why is my skin
Considered a stain on this country?
How can I be reduced to a blemish
Among the clear skinned?
I see through them, for they arent just clear,
Theyre transparent.
I know how damn easy it is to hide behind their white privilege,
I know because they dont tense up when they pass a cop
They dont get ignored when they choose to speak
They arent questioning whether their job is using them as a statistic to uphold the
companys quota
They don't get questioned for trying to be a culture they dont belong to
They dont get judged by the color of their skin
They dont have skin, and barely any backbone as well
Allies?
You just want to avoid the guilt of our past

You just want to look more human to others

You are just fulfilling yourself
You dont care about my dirty skin,
But yet
My skin is dirty, but not sinfully
My skin is the color of our soil
Her skin is the color of tree bark and hers of igneous rock.
Brown women,
Are not dirty.
They are the closest thing to natural as they can be.
How can the most colorless sect of people
Tell those with rainbow pigments
That they are not worthy of the ground in which they stand.
Colored people,
Built America on the soil you say is dirty.
Colored people are not dirty we do not need a Kleenex to wipe away our heritage,
We dont need to be cleansed we are not the guilty ones.
6) Gender Roles
We all think by some unspoken rule
Of the universe
That men are rock
Tough and untamable
That women will always be soft
And melt in some dirty mans palm
Weak, unsuspecting
Innocent
Below men
Bound at their mans feet, defeated
Force on their knees
Like theyre supposed to be,
And that is gender roles
7)
I am feminism.
I love all identities.
Wow, that was so hard.

8) Its 8:04 PM I have a quiz due in an hour and youre making me miss the hell out
of you
I didnt think you could pull these emotions out from the back of my throat
But fuck,
Ive been needing to breathe easier and you are my god damn oxygen tank.
Out of all the people I etched into my bones,
You are the one
That creeps up my spine, seeps into my ribs, embraces my heart, curls up behind my ear
and whispers truths about myself that I had yet to examine.
So many fluttery memories to miss,
But it is your hands I miss the most though
Gentle soft and broad,
I can feel them in mine right now.
You were never unsure of how to use them,
You taught me how to use mine.
I didnt think falling for an artist would be this simple but somehow
I feel as though your words are paint strokes I knew I could make.
Demonstration that showed me
Where to start,
Do I curve up or down? Do I take a wide sweep across a canvas until your hips, lips and
legs are at my fingertips again? Do I take long strides downward and remind myself how
bold your speech pours from your sweet sweet mouth?
You are my peach
I your plum
In that our individual seeds will sit untouched, till we by chance meet again
In wet New Jersey soil
Grow into trees of love,
Canopies devoted to one-another.
We need to swallow our promises
And avoid these nutrients of lust
We have nowhere to grow.

9) FUCK GIRLS
Fuck girls
Because there is an inherent evil behind those red lips.
Men don't play with minds the way women do; men manipulate
But women sink poison into your tongue and mind, laying dormant until youve stopped
needing them
And then you begin to show signs,
You crave them
You ache for their touch and the shine in their hair, mid-laugh gasps,
And of this I'm guilty as well.
When women unmask themselves,
When they show the inside of their chest, past the round curve of their breasts,
When they dig through their rib cage for emotions they left far behind,
It's striking a match too near to a heart fueled by diesel.
Women want to watch the world burn because they want to feel passion, the flame of
romanticism.
There's warmth in the ending of the world,
In the physical rift in our distanced locations
In the tsunami outpour of long lost love
In the hurricane of "What I never said.
Tears upon tears upon tears upon my fist through the wall,
The femme beauty has venom in her fingernails.
How do we love women despite the sly aggression they harvest?
Just unleash a nuke,
Might as well kill me
Because I love women as much as I'm terrified of them.

10) Limited Edition

And how raw is it
That when two souls know their time together is limited,
They have the ability to abandon all of the anxiety of rejection and
with the heat of lust
Can mend together
Such delicate glass
But so worth the color
Of your goosebumps when I nestle into your chest and breasts.
The color of your eyes when I dig my teeth into your bottom lip
The color of my heart ache when you text me 4 months later with a boyfriend under your
hood and my tail between my legs,
You are the intimidation that makes me want to stick around in this world
For the chance that I might see where our relationship picks up,
To abandon my low-key urge to die young and embody the pure instinct to live for as
long as possible.
You have a way of showing yourself to me, dropping yourself into me like food coloring
into dish soap,
You use me to make both of us beautiful,
You make me beautiful.
And maybe I can join myself to you,
Or at least
Curl up next to you in a bed.
I guess we waited too long,
We let our metal cool before we spent the time we were meant to spend,
Maybe in time we will metamorphose
And find ourselves closer together.