American Woman (Except It’s Really Just Me)
Adrianna Bugliarello-Wondrich
The American woman desire to cut my armpits on dull razors as I sit shaving on the bathroom toilet lid
thinking about troubled girls in troubled movie scenes
The American woman desire to have it mean something more when I bleed
The American woman desire to be the dull static smile of a flickering Hollywood black and white
beauty queen
The American woman desire to sit in lavender-scented candlelight and wonder if the flames’ white
centers dance or scream
I American Girl Doll desire to braid my hair into tight waterfalls until it makes my scalp itch
The American woman desire to drink 1 cup of water 8 times a day for 3 months straight and then go
half a year forgetting all the self care shit
The American women desire something more than just a septet
Let me American Girl Scout, On my honor, tell you a secret
The American Woman, she doesn’t really exist
This is just a way to mask myself behind some generalization in the dark makeup era of my own insane
bitch manic fits
(Oh, I so often (American) wonder(woman) how many times I’ve been called the crazy ex-girlfriend
off of some ratty chapped love-beaten lips)
So the American woman (I, myself, specifically) desire for my womb to mean that I am always
pregnant
The American woman (I, myself, horrifically) desire to believe that each month I bleed myself a sticky
liquid child of fresh sustenance, some writhing, amorphous mass composed of clots of the stuff that
keeps my own heart beating
The American woman (I, myself, inexplicably) desire to be one with the Earth as I wrap my tampon in
tissue 8 times before wringing my hands out in the sink
(We, American Crime Story suppliers, have each month a fantastical show of what becoming victim
might look like)
Like some Lady Macbeth unsexed body obsessing over the running faucet’s sing begging for the
blood to end to end to end and then eagerly awaiting for it to come again.
Adrianna Bugliarello-Wondrich will be graduating in May of 2023 with a double major in English and women’s, gender, & sexuality studies and a minor in geography. Born in Northern New Jersey, she moved to a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, when she was eight years old. However, when choosing a college, she couldn’t help but return to the (much contested) greatest state in the U.S. by committing to Rutgers University. Wherever she’s at, her happy place is cuddled up with some candles, a cat, a racing mind, and a book or a pen, doing all she can to understand the world she’s living in just a little bit better.
This poem was written in a creative writing course taught by Professor Joanna Fuhrman, who selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.