Walking on the damn streets

These streets are not my own. I have no right to walk by myself, I have no right to wear tank tops in the summer or let a skirt ripple my skin on a breezy day. I should expect for men to whistle, it must mean they like me. I mean I am intruding on their streets, kings of the castle, these are their moats. The streets are theirs. They run them, rape them and allow me to walk on them when I am a good girl, when I wear my hair down and look like I am asking for it. I think I am always asking for it. You can hate it a little, you can kinda scream and shout, but not too loud, don’t draw attention to yourself, your tits, your words, you’re at risk. Don’t be that woman who swears back, don’t be the girl who talks loud. Just keep walking, on their streets, don’t fight back. Don’t even think about lifting your sword. Cause when your image doesn’t conform to their standards, when you don’t smile back at their “hey baby’s” then you are not signaled down, you are thrown down, by words, risks, bruises, things that leave scars on pavement and drops souls into sewers. But what if. What if we did fight back, what if we held our skirts in fisted hands, and screamed out of painted lips a big “fuck you.” What if we walked down broken streets with flashlights, kicking pieces of patriarchy, and sexism and just followed our own torch. What if we all decided to fight back, what if we decided to stop worrying about passing their inspection, about size 2’s, and fake boobs. What if we stopped trying to erase ourselves by bleaching, bleaching our hair, our skin, bleaching the last traces of what happens to “promiscuous” girls from our bed sheets, our back streets. What if we decided that our cunts are beautiful, are words are beautiful, long breaths of unhierarchical horizontal air is beautiful. What if we could all ban together, like a growing crowd of pedestrians at a street corner, waiting for a long light to turn green. What if we could come together, forget our differences, forgive our history, walk forward to our future. Well maybe then we could walk on the streets, then we could make them our own.