In Their Own Words
Claire Dougherty on “Women”
Women
Women still must be sexy in order to command attention.
Men continue being completely on the nose. There really is
a famous very rich male artist Painting very large
paintings Of mutilated vaginas And calling them Dead
Mother In the midst of a divorce in which he isn’t allowed
To talk to his little daughter and the paintings
Are priced at a million dollars. He’s just arrived
In Los Angeles with his very young little girlfriend
For his opening. It’s her first trip
to America, she’s an Italian
beauty pageant queen. Her sixty-eight
year-old boyfriend’s ex wife
complained that she would never have any power
with him. “She knew what she was getting into,”
said his gallerist over the phone to someone. His girlfriend
smiles sweetly. She’s definitely going on shopping sprees
which I respect. At the opening she looked lonely,
kept stepping outside, so I said “how are you” in a way to invite her
to conversation if she needed it, but she walked away quickly.
I feel like a servant around her. We’re not that different,
I want to tell her, she just has those Givenchy boots.
About “Dead Mother” none of the press had any questions.
As mute as if they were at a lecture for a required class.
The artist loves to say that women
have a natural access to blood, while men
can only access it through war,
circumcision or hunting. What about doctors?
I want to ask, but I’m only an assistant. I no longer
menstruate. My IUD has finally cut off
my natural access to blood. The artist
talks about his colors, his famous blood red and
electric blue which looks nothing like the sky
but he speaks not on the flat pale Crayola flesh tone
of the body of the mother whose vagina he’s torn apart
to access her blood. Who is she? Kris Jenner, a famous mother
wanted to meet the artist and see his paintings, so on Sunday
morning when the gallery was closed I came to turn
on the lights for her and to offer her water. She was just like she is
on TV! She gave club and restaurant recommendations
to the artist’s girlfriend while the artist took phone
calls and made her wait. She gifted the artist
a SKIMS blanket for his long plane ride back to London
or Venice or Miami. Actually he’s going to the Bahamas
She mentioned her daughters a lot and said Kylie
was building a new house again with walls
big enough for these big bloody paintings. She wore a black
velvet leisure suit and arrived in a black Escalade
her driver kept running for the entirety of the visit.
I talked to her bodyguard Alfonso, who said everything
would work out for me. Then Kris asked for a cappuccino,
and while I was running across Santa Monica Blvd to buy one
from the LGBT center, I got hit by a car and I died
Reprinted from Guilt, Fear, and Superstition (Food, 2026) with permission from the author.
On "Women"
“Women” was one of the first poems of Guilt, Fear, and Superstition (Food, 2026) that I wrote. The way I had been putting poems together, collaging language written from automatic writing, was boring me. It started to feel fearful, like I was avoiding something that needed to be addressed directly, but directness scared me. So I told myself to write “bad” poems: whatever thoughts came to my head, without worrying if they were good, interesting, smart, or correct. This was a process distinct from automatic writing—writing fast to outrun my thoughts. Writing “bad” poems freed me.
“Women” was a “bad” poem. “Women still must be sexy in order to command attention” is a “bad” thought I wouldn’t have considered writing down. At the time, I was concerned with the fact that every female popstar is so sexy. Is sexiness the only way to get attention as a woman? It’s certainly one way, maybe the quickest, but I want to say it’s not the only way. I’m making a blanket statement, but if I didn’t let myself make it, I might have killed the poem before it had a chance to get written. Being afraid of sounding stupid is a perfect way to never write anything.
When I tell stories about funny events, sometimes friends say, “You should write a poem about that!” It used to annoy me. I felt like saying, You don’t know how a poem gets made; it’s not like I just write down what happened! Then one day I followed this suggestion and the poem came so naturally. “Women” was like that. The events are true. I wrote like I was telling the story to a friend. In fact, some lines began as text messages that I copied and pasted into the poem. Now that I think of it, “Women” is a Personism poem in that “if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.” It’s a bit like Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died.” As in that poem, a series of breathless “I do this, I do that” observations lead to the last line where the speaker stops breathing.
The only thing that didn’t really happen was I didn’t die. I was so anxious Kris Jenner would ask for a cappuccino and I wouldn’t be able to make it properly. My plan was to run across the street real quick and buy her one, but the quickest way to the coffee shop was an unprotected crosswalk which, if you’ve ever tried to cross Santa Monica Boulevard unprotected, is really scary. I imagined getting hit by a car on Santa Monica Boulevard trying to buy Kris Jenner a cappuccino. The thought of this made me laugh, so I put it in the poem. In real life, she asked for water.
I placed “Women” at the beginning of Guilt, Fear, and Superstition because I loved the idea of starting the collection with the speaker’s death, as if the poems that follow are from an afterlife, or as if that death is a birth. It’s the birth scene of the collection of poems that follows, and of my renewed pleasure for writing poetry.
