Poetry: Selections from Jodie Baeyens

Pink

I made mud pies

and climbed trees

but there was always pink

Barbie and Princess dresses

 

No safety in the feminine

No safety in the pink

 

Pink that I was expected to be

You have brothers – they said

They will protect you

Pink never protects you

 

I went to my brother when

The man renting a room in our house

Made me pull down my pink panties

 

I went to my brother

When my mother’s boyfriend held me

Against the kitchen wall

 

I couldn’t find the power in myself

Men - they would hurt me

Men - they would protect me

I was simply there

 

In pink

Touch Your Edges

I touch your edges

My hands

covered in paper cuts

from the words you wrote

bleeding

from the ones you didn’t

I try to touch gently

yet still

you cut me

leaving tiny scars

on my hands

on my heart

on my pages

Keep It

I begged for rain

and when it came

I spent the night

without power

 

My ex husband

swooped in and started

the generator he left behind

the last time I lost power

 

He left it without fuel

or instruction

useless

 

He kept the kids up until 1 AM

like he did when he lived here

and I, useless, did nothing

 

I lay awake next to the kids until morning

while he slept

 

Waiting

for him to leave and

for the power

to come back

3 A.M.

It is the time again

When I jolt up in bed

And look around the room

 

It is the hour of panic attacks

Pot smoking

Frantic writing sessions

 

I see the world

Through the eyes

Of 3 A.M.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Perhaps

no man

has ever loved me

for anything more

than

how I made them feel

about themselves

Jodie Baeyens is a professor at American Military University. She was deposited in Arizona from Manhattan, against her will, and now lives in a rural farming community writing poetry and drinking red wine. Her poetry has most recently been featured in Door is a Jar and in Peregrine’s Fall Journal.