The Ultimate Woman

Sitting inside the table of my chicken-leg psyche,
I imagined sharing a cup of tea with Baba Yaga.
This apparition of her was wild--
a gust of wind blowing in every direction.
Her hair frothed like foam,
and her eyes glowed
with the many moons she’d bathed in.

Myth paints her as a creature,
a spinster witch seeking mischief and misfortune.
She is too much, too soon, too empowered in her own wildness.
Isn’t it ironic that a deeply embodied woman is something to be feared?

There are so many fragmented realities
of what the performance of a woman should look like
that there is a gaping absence
where substance would have lived.

It looks like a chicken, it sounds like a chicken, but does it feel like a chicken?
Baba Yaga has reached a state of utter disregard for how she is perceived,
and somehow, she is more of a woman than I am myself.

Womanhood is earned through ugliness, the taboo, the too-good-to-be-true.
Our bodies bleed.
Our breasts suspend in mid-air.
Our skin melts as we age.
Our hair exhales its last drop of color.
Our faces become maps of the lives we lived,
and our hearts grow heavy with the lives we wish we did.

Baba Yaga is the ultimate woman.
​
As I sit here on this scuffed chair,
watching her stir her tea with her fingers,
I realize the journey has only just begun.