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.

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