Am I A Feminist?

1.

Am I a feminist?

I make the fantasy real for him, giving up parts of myself –

My look

My mind

My body

My heart.

Pieces of me, served up over silver platitudes,

three course meals

and French champagne.

2.

Malleable breasts and tight buttocks

reclaim their complimentary one half of the whole

reality

filling holes in Psyche every time she is alone.

Separate and connected,

happy and unremarkable

half truths, open to anyone who will listen.

3.

In her deepest recesses, she is compartmentalised – a waif, aloof.

Dissociation

learned to leave a long time ago, doing only what they wanted to make them happier

for the two of us.

A tragedy, waiting for a fairy tale ending that doesn’t involve

the death of Eros.

Instead she paints pictures that never quite get finished –

My pencils

My paints

My inks

My pastel chalks

covered in charcoal dust fingerprints,

scared of letting go.

4.

She still held on

to dreams

of Volkswagon beetles,

Austin land crabs,

Holden utes and XD Falcon

panel van’s reinforced with 6ml steel plates

pink stickered on the side of the road.

5.

I say goodbye to all the abusers –

My family

My friends

My lovers

My colleagues.

Self care now cloistered in her abandon while you watch,

published one day by some back shed press, captioned

‘Clichèd-Poet-Ends-It-All’

because forfeiture has no shame.

She was happier then

and then she died,

turning grey like her foibles and colourless lines.

6.

Am I a feminist?
© Copyright 2019, Jodine Derena Butler & Poetry Out West. All Rights Reserved

Backshed Brazen

Behind the backshed, a worrying malevolence stays hidden in the shadows, glimpsed as the suns ray’s penetrate through the rhetoric, shining a light on all our ‘if only’s’, for a few brief moments.

/

If only Brazen had decided to kneel, bow down to those ‘Miriams’ withholding the ink from the well, & lick the carbon-dated dust accumulating on their threadbare shoes – lament temporarily lost at any cost, for the pen-ultimate facade.

A facade?

Those imposters she once knew, with their apoplectic gesticulations still choose to play their cards like liars & thieves, a charade more likely, based upon contrived lines of which they steal unto her buxom bosom.

Miriam broke her heart!

/

Her most respected iconoclast smashed the gavel into her brain / her overseer’s donning cats!

Both burned into her retina, like a world map on her marble.

/

Brazen sits in the corner under her dunce cap.

Mothballed poetic justice, relegated to a mere diary of questionable truths.

But I know!

I know what went on behind the backshed – you!

The Miriams’ of this world, have a lot to answer for.

© Copyright 2018, Jodine Derena Butler & Poetry Out West. All Rights Reserved

Backshed Bullshit Press

“We can’t approve every poet, in case it reflects badly” JD Butler

‘It’s only a name and doesn’t really mean anything’

But it seems as though it matters at the end of the day.

Standards must be kept after all.

It’s only for skilled/educated, literate poets.

We can’t approve every poet, in case it reflects badly.

We must make ourselves look good.

Weed out the riff raff as it were.

Make a name for ourselves.

Only the chosen few will be supported.

Friends and family.

© Copyright 2018, Jodine Derena Butler & Poetry Out West. All Rights Reserved

Fact