Women by Ashley Kirkland

Women

My friend and I are talking (we talk most mornings,
it’s one of those things that keeps us going) &

she’s telling me about her boss, how she makes her
feel like a small girl in trouble & yet her boss compares

women to the sun: constant, strong. My friend tells me she’s neither,
maybe she’s conflating women and mothers, she says, & I think

about the link between youth & shame, how the connection follows
us into adulthood, how even now I feel so small when I feel

shame. My friend says she’s more like a lake because she has boundaries
& depth. An ocean would be too big, she says. I don’t tell her,

but I think she could be an ocean if she wanted; a hurricane tearing
through the joint. I’m a poet so I think of the moon– bright & ever-

changing, guiding, pulling. She takes on all of the metaphors
then, and says, it’s funny, you know, that we have this urge to compare

women to part of nature when we are nature. She tells me about women
in the Bible, the word ezer, how the phrasing the first time it appears

is stronger than the male translators ever gave us credit for, which, I think,
is what we’ve always fought. Metaphors that underestimate us, make us

larger than life. Myth. The sun, the lake, the moon, when we’ve really
only ever been ourselves, which is to say, everything all at once.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.