(for my slave ancestry)

     Once she was a high school
student, reading Bessie Head, and Athol
Fugard’s plays, bipolar-experimenting
with mascara, and lipstick, straightening
her hair, being bullied on the playground, she
had no one to eat lunch with, read the
newspapers and encyclopaedias in the
school library, and even the teachers
would hate on her, hate on her, hate her,
mock her proper English, and drama,
and rehearsals would save her, but she
didn’t know how long for. Now it is
Hemingway, and Fitzgerald that saves
her. Now she’s found her calling, and
it is writing short stories. She’s a good-
enough poet, but she wants to be world-
famous for her beauty. She wants to
be a princess like Grace Kelly. She wants
to be an Oscar-winning actress, a flying
director, a bird of a producer, this novelist
in training. Nobody loves her. Nobody
wants her. Nobody wants to make her
their wife. Nobody wants to build a family
with her. Dear Reader, she says, remember
me. She writes about her adolescence
in her poetry, her ancestors, her elders,
the sacrifices that the matriarchs of her
family made, her manic-depressive father
who was brilliant at neglecting her, and
sometimes she thinks of her survival-guide of

          surviving the worst mother in
 the world who abused her mentally,
verbally, and physically when she was a
child, but now it’s too late to turn the
clock in the wall back, erase the dysfunctional-
past, her diaries filled with madness, the
journals filled with love stories of Carl,
and Shakira, Hilton, and hockey, and
there were issues of eating disorders, and
anorexia nervosa, bulimia, but she outlived
all of that fucking shit, and she called the
healing periods in her life recovery, but there
were relapses too. She was the perfect
mental patient. She cried on cue, ate up all
her food, prayed when it was required of
her, laughed and smiled and lied and said
how she adored men, never mentioning
how much men hated her for her intelligence.
Once she was perfect, once her world
was perfect, nobody is listening now to her
anymore, she wants to inspire others, she
wants to become a writer, a novelist, she’s
a poet, but no man loves or wants her because she’s
too perfect, and she never fails at anything.

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Abigail George has two books in the Ovi Bookshelves,
"All about my mother" & "Brother Wolf and Sister Wren"
Download them, NOW for FREE HERE!