orange dress

to all the bad daughters

My two legs are crossed like a knot tied. No, placed like christ on the stake. My two legs are apart like audacity let loose. No, open like a dead fish's mouth agape.

I smell of fresh daisies and wet lavender buds, rubbed hard into my twin wrists like deliberate slits.

My bare chest is lightly adorned with a pendant resembling a clover. A small, refractive thing over my skin turning red in patches, resting where their naked eyes linger like snakes slither in wetlands.

The new skin on my arms is plump, alive, unwilling, and threatening. So I wrap it absentmindedly with a silky scarf like a muzzle arranged over a dogs face.

“Change, quick,” she said 7 minutes before I could become visible in my entirety. “Horrendously short.” Good girls are fabric before they are flesh. The myth of a good house’s good girl being slammed across my hollow cheeks again. I am not a good girl.

I cup my knees with my palms but I am growing outside of my dress. Seams trembling. I am bigger than the fabric tied tight around my waist like a noose disguised.

My love handles peek and my flesh glistens but it's not for them, it was never for them but they look, they always look, and suddenly I am a danger. Not to myself, but to their mythologies of control and purity and silence and obedience.

My silhouette lures in foreign fingers, they were taught that everything visible is theirs. They move down and up in circles, unrestrained with their hands and eyes without shame.

My skin throbs with a burning. Despicable. They peel me layer by layer and not cloth, but meaning, not dress, but myself. Until I am reduced to ashes. Ugly ashes, they say. As if the fire was my doing. As if I struck the match on my own skin.

They place me in an urn which is labelled, contained, and explained. And my orange dress, my bright, defiant, breathing dress, lies in shreds, like evidence of a crime I never committed. But I am not done burning.

I am not the slut.

— another woman who gets sexualized, objectified, slutshamed, threatened, touched, grabbed and lives in the constant fear of “what if”

xx