Portrait Of A Woman On Fire
How I'm learning to feel and harness rage
A few months ago two friends and I booked twenty minutes in a Rage Room, a space dedicated to allowing individuals to express their anger by smashing unwanted glassware and car scraps. When I told people I was going, several of them were surprised. They couldn’t imagine me angry. I wasn’t sure how to explain my relationship with rage—the decades spent attempting to repress its white hot burning in my chest—the unsustainable toll of swallowing fury as it eroded my mental and physical health. I wrote the following poem as a response:
SHARKS You are surrounded by us, millions of shark women camouflaged as goldfish. When I share plans to visit a Rage Room, they say I cannot imagine you angry. Flashbacks of outbursts at thirteen, seventeen, twenty spin through my mind before stopping at twenty-three. Like my foremothers, I learned to temper fury with famine. I pry my ribs open to reveal teeth lining each bone. The famished jaws of a bull shark, row up…