Manhunt

by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Pussy certified all-natural by the Daughters of the Witches You Couldn’t Burn or whatever Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival bullshit the TERFocracy in Maryland bowed down to.

No matter how prepared you were, some things just rolled over you in a hot, sticky black tide and you were lucky if they left you standing.

New men, she thought, gripping the gutter and bracing a foot against the wall. Like Coke Zero. Same great vicious disregard for our lives, none of the socially enforced restraint!

They were out there, making their own manhood in the wreckage of the world.

There had always been radfems in New England, enclaves of sneering middle-class white women who talked a lot about performing gender roles and appropriating lived experience. They curated incestuous little social media cells where they repeated the same six talking points to the same thirty other women while cis men came sniffing around their hindquarters, venting pent-up hatred on trans women and making sure real women saw them doing it so they could get accredited as feminists and maybe, if they were lucky, catch a whiff of pussy.

The world is over, and the only way I can know myself is by hating other women.

That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.

Was he here, when the world ended, or did the painter bring him in her memory?

I’m a girl until a real one decides I’m not.

Better to shit outside than be declawed.