Juliet Takes a Breath

by Gabby Rivera

Feminism. I’m new to it. The word still sounds weird and wrong. Too white, too structured, too foreign; something I can’t claim. I wish there was another word for it. Maybe I need to make one up.

“You said, ‘We’re the ones that need to give women of color space for their voices,’” Maxine replied, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. “Y’all don’t need to give us anything.”

“You know just saying something is good enough until it isn’t. At all.”

Her consistent linking of genitals to gender as an absolute is violent as hell. It’s a closed fist instead of open arms, you know?

My own foray as a writer’s assistant took place in the early 2000s and that’s what I wanted to capture. Shit was fucking intense. There were color-coded terror threats every morning and George W. “Strategery” Bush was president. Gays couldn’t get married in the U.S. and my mom still whispered when she said the word lesbian. “Magic Stick” by Lil’ Kim & 50 Cent was on the radio and I didn’t yet know the differences between gender expression and gender assigned at birth. This was the world I was becoming a young adult in and I wanted to catch a slice of it before it faded away.