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  • Spoiled
  • Becca Shaw Glaser (bio)

i wanted to say oh wow you spoiled boy with the fanciest bike and the easiest life and the perfect lover well good for you you spoiled piece of shit but then i didn't want to bring such hatred into the world and then i wanted to say well what is fairness? is it fair my grandma hands me a hundred dollar bill with a blue vibrating ribbon when i come to visit is it fair my mother and father and stepfather and my brother and now me own houses is it fair is anything fair? if i could get the world and just sweep it off the table start from scratch instead the feminist who likes being naked is too busy hating her body but it is nothing really it is fruit off a tree in fall it is my mouth opening over the vowels it is my brother brushing his teeth it is the beaver risking death to leave the den in winter. look at my transgressive belly rising from the bed as i breathe look at the extra ten pounds as what stops you from getting the man of your dreams or look how you think the man of your dreams will know to never buy you slave trade supermarket flowers you'll be happily ever after you don't want to get married history of ownership money and regulation of relationships but you want the house you go to for solace and safety. is it fair centuries of skin and what it was said to mean and whose bodies provided labor what was sex inside of slavery and marriage which the law until 1993 said couldn't include rape because the women were property and even today many states say rape by a spouse is less bad than rape by someone else. is it fair these holocausts of history everything so carefully catalogued and because the law said it was just it was? [End Page 278]

Becca Shaw Glaser

Becca Shaw Glaser is coeditor and author of the activist manual Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out. Other nonfiction work appears in The Icarus Project, Mad in America, Off Our Backs, Entropy, xoJane, the Maine Commons, Luna Luna, and the Rumpus. Her poetry has been published in Black Clock, Lemon Hound, Birdfeast, Vinyl, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Alimentum, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Quaint, and New South, among other publications. She is a graduate of Syracuse University's Creative Writing MFA Program. She can be reached at beccaglaser@gmail.com.

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