The wonderful ashpags suggested this poem, and as it turned out, I already had it on my list (ashpags may be a little magic)! At some unknown point this year, I was at the Strand and picked up a little book called Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, edited by Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan (New York: OR Books, 2018); this is one of the poems in the collection.
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn't moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
—Kim Addonizio, "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall," in this case from Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, 2018 (although I think the poem may originally have been published in 2016).
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