Rag Queen: Gender, Generations
Two high-spirited,
deep-feeling, savvy young women start an online poetry magazine. They title it Rag
Queen. I submit a poem, after a poet friend, also a woman, introduces me to
its existence. After my poem is published, I tell my daughter, plenty savvy
herself, that the magazine is called Rag Queen. She exclaims with
unalloyed pleasure, “That’s great.” She knows immediately that the rag in
question is the monthly rag worn to collect menstrual blood.
I’m startled.
Does her generation of women feel as mired in their femaleness as mine
occasionally did? Is it still outspoken
smart-ass to refer to menstruation in public? When did I stop being fixated on
my femaleness and become more attuned to the ways gender and generation twine
through both men and women?
Exhibit: My
husband has become softer in body as he’s aged, yet his upper body is still
laughingly much stronger than mine. His forearm muscles are rock hard. He lifts
weights to help keep them so. But my legs perform better than his. I don’t have
ankle, knee, hip pain. He does. My legs are relatively strong, compared to the
skinny-minny, other parts of my body. Is this because, since early childhood I
walked to school and biked everywhere? Or is it because I inherited my father’s
flabby upper body, but my mother’s strong lower one? Through the thirty years
I’ve known my husband, he’s preferred driving to walking. Most of his cars are
red.
Exhibit: This
mid-April I escaped Minnesota’s cold and took the slow ferry from Naples across
sea-green waves to the Isle of Capri. The slow ferry was quieter and less
crowded than the “turbo-powered,” more pricey option. Sinking in bliss and
fatigue onto a bench on the upper deck, I let go all kinds of imperatives and
simply gazed at what was passing on the right: rocky splits of land dotting off
from Naples proper, then the bigger island of Ischia, shimmering in the sunlit
blue.
A family of four
sat ahead of me. The father was tall and sandy-haired, with a hawk-like nose
and long, stilt legs. Moving jerkily around the benches, he seemed almost
incapable of sitting still. The dark-haired mother lounged in one place, her
soft plump body slowly sliding as she dozed. Their daughters, both tall and
willowy, yet acted quite differently. One, like her father, kept on the move.
The other, like the mother, sat quietly in place, reading or staring over the
brilliant blue. It took me a while to notice that though the daughters both had
long, sandy-colored hair which whipped in the breeze, their profiles were
surprisingly distinctive—the sedentary one had their mother’s broad, soft
features; the active one, their father’s sharper look.
Eventually the two
sisters sat together, talking softly. I sighed with relief. This was the way it
should be, I thought. But given how my sister and I have tugged away from each
other over the years, such sisterly companionship is not at all predestined.
Exhibit: Back to
literature: The mysteries my husband likes usually bore me after a few pages.
He doesn’t show much interest in the psychological memoirs, novels, and poetry
I enjoy. It’s a gender divide I tell myself, as is the fact that though far
more women read works of all kinds than do men, far more men are published.
Thank you, Rag
Queen co-founders, creative director Marlana Eck, editor-in-chief, Kailey
Tedesco, for your energy and aplomb, your friendship that flowered into a
garden of female delights. Thank you for publishing men, but putting women
writers first.
Thank you, for letting
me interview you via the internet, for insisting, Marlana, that “Women’s
stories are SO important. It’s imperative that we let them tell their stories
from their viewpoints….Women develop a lot of grit in their lifetimes, and Rag
Queen hopes to speak to that.”
Thank you, Kailey,
for asserting that “I’m not looking for [Sylvia] Plath mimicry…I want
confessionals that are eclectic, hybrid, messy in all the right places, strange
and professional at once. Give me a poem that can easily transmogrify into its
own woman. Give me a sea-witch, or a mushroom fairy, or your Nana on
paper.”
donna@mail.postmanllc.net
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