Let affection drip on me, like the blood of a fleshly opened fresh carcass, hung on hooks for drying healing herbs.
I open to let the raw red meat drip into me and I swallow, of no gulp, and await the growth within my bellows. They turn away until you kick me. But unlike previous years these nine months of kicking are not a beating and railing with inward guttural fury. But the anger that is not the half that comes of me. Turned anger in me, it eventually forces out. Do I hate it?
Yes. I hate this red screaming anger. It did not come into the world like I did, already with a slit of a mortal wound between my legs. The wound that would only serve to shun me as the weaker to be picked off in the pack of the strong sword strung swinging beasts.
I hate you for taking away the potential of my life, I hate that you are half the man who again took from me, and will in likeness grow to him. It is all you can do; all you men can do is take, from the already weakened and wounded women.
Lana Burns was born in New Zealand and has written from a young age. Having decided quite young that she wanted to either be a writer, warrior princess or spy she went to study theatre and English lit at Victoria University of Wellington. Whilst studying there she attended two creative writing courses at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Having graduated she is producing the second play that she has written and intends to extend out in the writing field. She intends one day to be Virginia Woolf, or the NZ equivalent Janet Frame in feminine writing style.
