Day 25

Challenge: Use a random word generator to come up with 10 words to use in your poem. (The words that popped up for me today are: rhetoric, payment, root, scenario, spider, magazine, walk, shiver, contempt, copy.)

Payment

I would like, at last, to 
acknowledge the debt I
created with all of this
relentless rhetoric. Rooted 
in my childhood as a girl, 
I’ve explored every scenario 
of impotence assigned me,
and my words (black
widow spiders) have
webbed the delicate cuts 
men’s magazines etch 
into our female bodies. 
But even so, by ten I
couldn’t walk. I shivered in
my bed, aching. Then,
fifteen, my girlfriends 
expressed contempt for every
thing intellectual until I 
became this mere copy 
of woman: plastic, smiling, 
with blue eyes that close 
when you put me down.