This poem is for the girls.
For the girls whose favourite colour growing up was green,
Not pink.
For elementary school princesses still dreaming of being royalty
For the cheerleaders and the songwriters
The girls who loved fairy tales, who love romantic comedies,
For the girls who will not let you blame their anger or sadness on PMS
Regardless of what time of the month it is.

This is for Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Too emotional to hold the presidency in an emotionally absent democracy
For Angela Carter, letting loose her lions,
For Britney Spears, once sixteen, once Mousekateer turned Catholic School pedophile bait,
Begging in costume for sex or
Smacks
This is for New York, the woman
For “Rock of Love Charm School” and “Bridezillas”
For Carrie Bradshaw
For Paris and her new BFF,
Successfully helping a gender regress

This is for the runaways
For the girls fainting down runways
For the girls who played their Barbie dolls into doctors and teachers
Made them something more than just disproportionately big breasted women,
But grew up in the mirror, dreaming of being disproportionately big breasted women
Because they were not allowed to be okay with A’s
For the girls who got A’s in their math and science classes
For the spitfires kicking the baseball teams’ asses
For
The girls who write poetry,
Who write love letters
Write “love me” down one arm and “I exist” up the other
For the girls who love sex
And are not afraid to share that with their judgment congregation
For girls who dress their best and girls who
Flaunt their breasts and
For the girls who love football, wrestling, and pillow fights

This is for all the girls who are all for the boys
For Zac Efron poster wielding daydreamers
For “Beauty and the Beast” believers
For the Penelopes and their faithfulness
Saving face to save themselves gracefully,
Falling apart behind closed doors
For the girls who like girls,
For the girls who kiss girls
For the girls who will someday, God willing or not, marry girls
This is for heroines who like themselves, who hate themselves, who hurt themselves but
Refuse to change themselves for someone else.
For the girls who will never get used to you calling them beautiful
But will never be okay with you calling them chicks, or dimes, or hunnies, or sluts, or hoes, or bitches, or pussy, or cunts or, or, or…

This is for high heels taking dark-alley steps carefully, listening because they have to
Because less than ONE PERCENT of rapists get thrown in jail and
This is for the girls whose monsters are still out there and
This is for the girls who made damn sure theirs aren’t.

For the girls fighting like hell to swallow more than doubt for dinner
For women watching family dinners go cold on family tables
For strong arms holding families together
For shoulders carrying relentless weights, relentlessly
For the homemakers and the home wreckers
For the heartbreakers and the breaking hearts

For girls watching their parents die from the inside out
Or the outside in.
For sisters raising siblings
Because family takes care of each other

This is to women working harder than their paychecks think
For the “man-eaters” who refuse to believe that the meaning of life
Is settling down and settling into settling for something less than what they want.
To the women who want to CHANGE this world before they bring children into it
For the femme fatales
For the femi-nazis
For the women still surviving the holocaust of their domestic violence at the hands of undomesticated ANIMALS
For wives who know that, until 1993, it was okay for a man to rape his woman because somehow we forgot that marriage does not equal ownership.
That LOVE does not warrant punishment.

This is for my mother, for the woman she helped make me
For the woman she made herself
For the sister I do not have, the one who was not allowed to live
For the daughters I will raise and love
For my friends, dancing with boys at parties
For my friends, clutching their drinks at parties
For my friends, being raped at parties

Ladies
We have the opportunity, daily, to ensure that the world takes us seriously
We have an obligation to demand that we are viewed as peers
Instead of servants to superiors.
A responsibility to hold our heads high and fight
For Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
For the women who voted in the 1920 Presidential Election
For Tina Turner
For women facing rapists on the witness stand,
Going from “victim” to “defendant” in seconds flat and
For black-eyed women having their husbands arrested
For poets redefining love to exclude servitude
For daydreamers
For “Beauty and the Beast” believers,
For your grandmother, and your mother, and your children, and yourself
Do me a favour
Get out your pens
Write “I exist” down this arm and
“love me” up the other and
In the middle, right over here,
In big capital letters
Scribble “Beautiful”
And get used to it.