Tag Archives: sexism

Untitled by Pamela Sneed

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generally I try hard

Not to lose my temper

Even when people piss me off and do mean or shady things I’ll barely respond

But I once taught a class full of guys

All cis hetero that challenged every word I said

Smirked when I tried to give feedback and instructions

They banded together in their disrespect

Then they were all absent going to the protests to stop the genocide in Gaza

One wrote, I encourage you to bring our colleagues during this historic moment

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, visual artist, and spoken word & musical performer (Big Mama Thornton). She is the author of Funeral Diva (2020), Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (1998) and many more. She is a painter, a political artist, and an assemblage and collage artist.
Teaching: She teaches online for the low-residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a visiting artist in the summer MFA program. She is an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

https://publictheater.org/productions/joes-pub/2024/p/pamela-sneed/

https://www.mrqd.org/events-2024/sneed

How to burn a woman

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Claire Askew

You will not need kindling.
I think I’ll go up quick
as summer timber, my anger
big and dry as a plantation
that dreams of being paper:
the updraft already made
in the canopy, and heading down.

Bring your axe to split me
into parts that you can stack
over the dry leaves, over the coals:
my old coat and my bedding box,
the things given to me by women.
You’ve heard of spontaneous human
combustion. They say it’s fat:
once lit, it flares so white-hot fast
the bones give in.
Make your touch-paper long.

Spread the word that the crowd
who will gather should stand
well back. I am coated
in the accelerant of men:
my craving for their good necks,
their bodies in button-downs
crisp as a new book.

As you douse the embers
I will smell like ground elder
choking the cemetery —
roots looping up
out of dead women’s mouths,
a problem thing
you’ll never get cleared.

Make the stake thick, the bonds
stiff on my innocent wrists.
Burn me the same way
you burned her: do it
because we took the plain
thoughts from our own heads
into the square, and spoke.

From How to burn a woman (pub. Bloodaxe, 2021)

After the horrendous anti-women hatred from Donald and his cult and anyone who voted for him, this poem is raw and fits perfectly in this evening of motors revving dying away and leafs smacking the window.