Feminal Injection
                                      after Daphne Gottlieb
 
Panty raid armor
Suck tit boots tight skin
You are the orifice
and I am the gem
 
Here we are in this porn booth again here we are at Doc’s Clock
The monotony of mojitos and fishnets in the Mission
The daily laughter up the staircase
I carry the cocktails
 
Here I am in my Peachy Puff costume
Cigarette girl to the stars    in your glazed eyes in North Beach bars
I wore the tulle I wore the cigarettes the candy & slaps on my ass in the dark
I clowned my persona I caked the dirt origin
 
Hold this bag
I’m a dig in this cave a minute
Pull up the sin pain shame game
Say her kind her names
 
I want to dig out the seminal
My shovel my story packed - hegemony and lies
All the dirt caked in my teeth my hair
All the gravelly bits buried in my womb
 
This teenage girl was in a ringer your lust your umbra avuncular 
this teenage girl was better than us
 
I desire and agency says yes
I am the agent and desire obeys
 
I desire a feminal canon
All femanimals to the front
 
i animal a feminal
in shoots and roots this canon
these bad-ass women
send their love:
 
Pat Parker Leonora Carrington Bhanu Kapil Leslie Simon Etel Adnan Juliana Spahr Frida Kahlo Diane Di Prima Anne Sexton
​Luce Iragaray Doris Lessing Meridel LeSeur Lisa Robertson Daphne Gottlieb Hildegard of Bingen Sylvia Plath Claudia Rankine Adrienne Rich Audre Lorde H.D. Kathy Acker Alice Notley Sharon Olds Gertrude Stein Michelle Tea June Jordan Bhanu Kapil
 
Decolonize this gutter belly
These stalactites
Day-glo cave paintings
 
[All the little men are sad
All the little men out of my bag]
 
These walls are dark & pocked with the calls of my kin the cavern of beginning’s echo drop your hieroglyphs elsewhere i run the blood here
 
Seminal is to embed semen in milestones
I’ve had enough cum in me already
 
Let’s all hold up our feminal
Say their names
Who’s been there to lift you up?
Speak those names right out loud
 
Carve them into our consciousness keep em coming 


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A note about the text:
One element I loved is how Daphne subverts the text of Joyce's Portrait to inject the "canon" with a post-modern female ethos. Female as injection, female as pedestrian, monotonous toil ala Stephen Dedalus in Portrait.   

​Melissa Eleftherion was born & raised in Brooklyn. A high school dropout, she went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from Mills College and an MLIS from San Jose State University. She is the author of huminsect, prism maps, Pigtail Duty, the leaves the leaves, green glass asterisms, and several other chapbooks. Her first full-length collection, field guide to autobiography, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N. Founder of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange, Melissa lives in Mendocino County where she works as a Teen Librarian, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series at the Ukiah Library. More of her work can be found @ www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.