I asked my great-grandmother how her arthritic bones felt
and she said better now that all the men on the street
consider her too old to wolf-whistle at like a soup kitchen
they think they’re entitled to their share of.
They just wanted to fill their bellies without caring
whether the recipient of their calls was hungry or not.
I asked my grandmother what planting marigold seeds
and watching them bloom was like and she told me
it was like waking up to her own unblemished skin
on the days my grandfather didn’t beat her black and blue.
I asked my mother how fast the rain poured the other day it stormed
so hard the roof caved in, and she said not even as fast
as she ran the day the stranger from the restaurant tried to chase her
and pin her down before opening her knees like a gutted fish.
I asked my twelve-year-old sister what love was
and she replied that she didn’t know,
but it looked a whole lot like the boy kissing the girl first
without asking her name
or if she even wanted his mouth pressed up against hers.
I asked my college graduate cousin what her first time was like,
and she said it was the last.
It was rape, not sex.
He was the knife; she was the whetstone.
He didn’t even look her in the eyes
before he started sharpening himself inside of her.
I asked my female English professor how to describe poetry
and she told me, while gesturing, that the language of poems
is like being able to slip through store after store
or street after street like an eel riding the currents of an ocean
without a single man commenting on her outfit
or lack thereof.
Then I asked myself a different question.
I asked myself why the word “woman” has “man” in it too,
but “man” is completely devoid of the word “woman.”
And I told myself that this was wrong,
that it should be the other way around,
because women give birth to men,
and create them from blood and tissue and bone
like the universe being drawn from stars,
and then I told myself that I don’t need a man
to be who I am.