Taken From: Kim Addonizio
“What Do Women Want?”
I want twilight woods.
I want it translucent with blue beads,
I want it pocket sized, I want to wear it
until my skin is clean and tears off.
I want it 1 fl oz and bottled,
this enriched germ-killing, so no one has to guess
what’s inside. I want to walk down
the street past McDonalds and the gym
with skin glittering in the window,
past the old Exon selling day-old
pies in their café, past the Matthews sisters
slinging aged beef from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the dirty dead with their hands.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth clean with my pick.
I want the twilight woods bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how obsessed I care
about hygine except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that bottle
from its shelve like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
twilight they bury me in.
The bold is preexisting words from the original poem. I didn’t know what I wanted so I pulled an object out of my purse and it was a mini Bath & Body Works anti-bacterial hand gel. So this is about it haha.
I honestly cannot accurately describe how much I absolutely love what you've done with Addonizio's piece. Alone, her piece is strong and bold, and it would be so easy to fall under the weight of expectation as it relates to her. You, though, have managed to avoid that. Your piece isn't consumed by the waves of Addonizio's legacy; you make it your own. Your postmodern take is self-evident. Line 5 just blew me away. You took her concrete image and quite literally liquified it. "1 fl oz" and "bottled" has such pro-feminist potential. An item made to target women that is, much like oppressed feminity, kept small and confined. I also enjoyed the allusions to Exon and McDonalds, which further draws the piece into a postmodern consciousness. The "skin glittering" and "old Exon" with "day-old pies" seems to suggest a rupture of one's identity due to the rampant consumerist ideology under which society buries itself. Then, when you consider the twilight woods brand and the desire to have it and the fact that it causes the glittering adds to the power of your postmodern critique of inauthentic identity.
ReplyDeleteI do keep in mind, however, that this may not have been your intention at all. But isn't it kinda funny how many interpretations can be drawn by many different individuals? Quite fascinating.
That exercise, is awesome! I'm most certainly doing this next week I only wish I had a purse to randomly grab from. I feel like you most certainly made the poem your own while also getting good practice out of it. I can't wait to start playing with that technique. I definitely agree with Chris in regards to the 1 fl oz, something so simple yet so descriptive in nature. It's great because by the end you didn't have to change anything, you made the poem work for you with the changes you already made.
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