Two After Harriet Forman Barrett, by Jan Alexander

The American Woman, by Harriet Forman Barrett (USA) contemporary.

 
The American Woman 
 
I was born with a silver spoon
 of Jello to bite,
 while the outlaws galloped across my TV screen, kicking up golden sand. 
 
The land of living colour beckoned. I drew it myself, in 150 Crayola hues. 
I etched in future mates--a cowboy on a roan stallion, a White Knight hopping over moon craters. 
 
“No, no, no,” my mother said. “Don’t you want to roam the range and walk on the moon yourself?”
 
I did. 
 
So I drew a portrait of America turning on its own axis. I sprinkled it all with glitter. That, too, made my mother frown. 
 
“Let’s go for a ride,” she said. We took off in the alabaster Chevy, and knocked on the door of two brown-skinned sisters. 
 
Their house was ashen gray, the floors bare cement. It was so stark it made me cry. 
 
Then the sisters handed me a sign, and we marched through streets with neon lights. We marched to a pink dawn sky, we trampled through fields of grain. We crossed the Rockies and watched the sun set over Malibu. 
 
People pelted us with curses but also with fists held high. The colors of their skin, their eyes, their words, were like nothing I could find in my Crayola box. They wore Stars and Stripes. They wore saris, patchworks, feathers, and beads. They wore slogans and satin. They lived in castles and they lived in caves. They drank champagne and they starved on the street. I stole diamonds on Park Avenue, found a pawnshop in Albuquerque and fed a Chinookan village. 
 
The next time I drew America it was a self-portrait. I think there will be more, because I’m still discovering colours. 
                                                         

Woman Dilemma, by Harriet Forman Barrett (USA) contemporary

Woman Dilemma

A man once asked me, at a party, “Do you realize all the other women in this room have bigger tits than you?”  

It made me sad, but only because when I looked around, at bazookas, knockers, hooters, zingers, twin missiles, I had no wish to go to war. 

I thought of replying: Do you long for Venus to gorge you on adoring enzymes? Roll over when you’re ripe, send you off primed and straight-arrowed, thrashing up the summit? Until the movie of your life hits its climax and you float through the music atop your star billing? 

Tit for tattle. I just said “I have other assets.” 

My being, I tried to tell him, is a spiral of cycles and rhythms, of complications that wind like a helix, of crests that meander into valleys. I give myself away, devour the wine of replenishment, adorn what’s left of me and begin again.  
​
“Are you saying,” he asked, “that you have the key to a sunken chest?" 
Now, why would I carry such a thing? You can’t unlock a woman with a key. 
   
Jan Alexander
                                                                                                       
Jan Alexander: "I divide my time between New York City and the New York Hudson Valley, where I co-produce a regular series of author readings. I’m the author of  Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization (Regal House Publishing, Sept. 2019), a zany utopian novel that was a Leap Frog Fiction Prize semi-finalist. My short fiction and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Atticus, Guernica, 34th Parallel, and Flash Fiction. I’ve also been a business journalist in New York and Hong Kong, a career that has provided no end of revelations about the human condition.

Harriet Forman Barrett is an artist, sculptor, and jeweller. Visit her at www.hformanbarrett.com.