An Ode to Me
Performed at Lincoln High School’s annual slam poetry competition, then at Verslandia, Portland’s youth slam poetry championship, April 2023
Self-love was never needed.
I was never told I was worthy of anything, so I made my worth.
Sculpted from fake-it-’til-you-make-it confidence
and a tear from not being perfect enough,
I wrote poems in one hand
and designed what I could be one day in the other.
Pencil scratching,
I theorized the concept of inevitability and growing up.
At what point am I a woman?
Is it here, in this classroom, when a boy sitting across from me stares at my chest?
Was it there, at that crosswalk,
where teenage boys yelled at me from a car,
and my first assumption was that I had dropped something,
so I turned around and checked the sidewalk?
Is it when I’m repeatedly talked over while eyes graze up and down my body?
Was it there, on that hillside,
where innocence, trust, and boundaries
were broken in a trifecta against the definition of consent?
I am worthy, just not of whatever this womanhood is.
If this is being a woman, toughing it out until the day I die,
then I don’t know if I would like to be one.
Then let this be an Ode to Her, the perfect woman.
Let her hair cascade down her back just as beautifully as mine once did.
Let her be assertive but gentle,
a slut but a virgin,
heaven to spite hell.
Let her speak volumes but not say a word.
Let her marry a man under a steeple,
give him a girl and pray for a boy,
and volunteer at the school every Wednesday.
Let her age at the end of the cul de sac,
and pass away in a house that was never hers.
Let her be buried in the backyard underneath the oak tree.
Let her china and sewing kits rot in the attic.
Let time pass without acknowledgement.
Let her moments on this earth be a pedestal for the men further down the family tree.
No one saw her potential, only the potential for creating something greater.
I sound jaded.
I’m a sixteen-year-old with a whole life ahead of me.
I can change and design my femininity without a man’s hand guiding the pencil.
Progress is possible; I can’t afford to believe otherwise.
The painful truth is, I will never be taken as seriously as a man.
I hold this fact close,
then release it into my consciousness whenever I begin to speak in a world full of him.
Who could I have been without his approval?
Now I have to let myself be as I want me.
I can find worth within me.
I am my perfect woman, self-love needed now more than ever.