woman country
MAY HATHAWAY
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There are no boyfriends here—no leaps
of faith taken. Here, we drape ourselves in lace, bodies bare. We have graduated from polished spaces and agreed. Pink walls do not make a woman country. Here, there is no one to stop the grass from rising above our ankles, to wipe away the dirt that gathers in the creases of our eyelids while we sleep. Swimmers lament the parched earth we inhabit and we roll our eyes at their slender torsos. Ribs do not protrude here. Beauty is a concept created by men so there is no beauty here, only survival. |
May Hathaway attends Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Her work appears in Blue Marble Review, The Aurora Review, and One Sentence Poems and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is a 2020 Adroit Journal Creative Nonfiction Mentee and enjoys doing crosswords in her free time.