"What's Your Damage, Heather?"

Magazine cover
quality women
with such gorgeous
narrow limbs
take up all the space in
the meeting rooms
of America's corporations.

They sit
across from me
wrinkling their
cute totalitarian
noses as if
they smell
something bad.

It's the flick of such
slick platinum hair
their seductive
skinny smiles and lightning
flash of glare, their intolerance
and the way they traipse
down the steel runway of the world
as if it was all owed to them.

And here she
sits, across from me
her forked tongue
silently slipping
between those lipsticked
lips, so that only I can see
for a moment, only I can get
that reptilian stare.

You sorority sister
boa-constrictor
squeezing out all my air
reducing me to nothing
but a 12-year old misfit
with snarls in my hair
throwing me back into that
adolescent anguish
where I am completely
insignificant
and there is
no mercy.

I am black and blue from
the sharp edges of you,
your fashionable fascism
and all your acceptable
unkindnesses.
But the worst part
is how I know
you are what the world
legitimates and loves
because "power always thinks
it has a great soul."