"Fuck This Shit" An Autobiography For Riot Grrls #7
copyright (c) 1996 by Annalee Newitz
it's quite clear
that she did not ask to be born
even the way she does not comb her hair (or, sometimes,
the way she does)
seems to relay the message:
what kind of mother would do this?
she has, as you might guess, turned her body into a map of ugliness
and yet the muscles still dance under the occasional scabs of her skin
so that her beauty is always just outrunning
whatever it is that makes her pick the pimples until they crack
like bitten bonbons
at random moments her eyes fill with grains and dust in silhouette
like a movie screen illuminating an old, ill-kept and dirty print
of something half-forgotten, something left over from a studio no longer
in existence
which we might, one evening, all flock to at the local rep house:
just discovered! the weird flick that inspired a whole
generation!
but she is the only one acting
and we too are forced to follow her inward look at that 50s B-grade
trashed hallucination
where women sprout stingers and mutate
from gorgeous stacked blondes into bad special effects which are somehow,
touchingly,
as realistic as the past itself is for her
who did not ever live in it
although she grew inside its body
uncontrollably filmed and degraded
believing only in science fiction
and not the world that dreams it
5-30-96
Back to the main Fuck page.