Un cadre semi-sauvage – Candice Louisa Daquin

Feminism in the late eighties

showed itself to me incompletely

a chain-smoking, pencil-thin waif

thought she was a sister

didn’t have a clean bra to burn

in the auditorium of quiet listeners

Luce Irigaray stood discussing; To Speak is Never Neutral

it was unpolitic of me to note she had high cheek bones

over vending machine chocolat chaud

with wet gloves and skinny scarfs, the outraged and the firm

discussed Julia Kristeva and her “chora”

an oeuvre of sorts

whether Simone de Beauvoir was existential or pawn to Sartre

what caused her to lose faith? Where once, she’d set her heart on being a nun

(was it true she seduced young girls in her forties?

are men penalized as harshly when they do the same?)

intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection

Jacques Lacan mentioned once or twice

exhaling and crushing yellowed Gauloises in cold coffee

I twirled my styrofoam cup, wondering

if unconscious sexualized behavior was bred

or a fantasy of linguistics formed by men?

if we’d wear red satin panties for ourselves, if a lover were not coming over tonight?

what constituted attractive, versus appropriated?

the desire I had for a small shinned girl

who wore canary yellow bands in her black hair

it was decided Hélène Cixous held the greater respect for

her le rire de la méduse

and being a Jew whose Écriture feminine

defied the patriarchy

whilst the logic of Antilove spelt the self-hatred women have

woman as anti-narcissism resonated in my pierced ears

a love of what we do not have

though the idea of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity

deconstructed my simple belief

love is love

Cixous was influenced ironically by a man

Derrida who now is quoted in most lesbian textbooks as

a defining force, phallus again describing women

fortunately he understood belonging constituted of exclusion and

non-belonging was real

I had chewed my pencil

sat at the end of the room so long

memorizing the backs of everyone’s heads

maybe I wasn’t very good at being part

of a spirited group even if they were my sisters

there were times they still

looked at me side-ways with cats eye glance

you learn young, means girls aren’t always your friend

nevertheless I dwelt on the

shape of a woman by the window and how

in half-light she could appear

to shimmer like a lemon tree receiving rain

I recalled a

Paul Verlaine quote

“De baisers superficiels
Et des sentiments à fleur d’âme”

(Of kisses that brushed the surface
And feelings that shook the soul)

and wondered

if french philosophers and feminists

were as I …

limited by their longing for romance

without rules and stark observation

in the crepe listing

of afternoon