Devon Balwit
Our Vaginas
“The Dinner Party” reiterates its theme—the celebration of women, both real and mythological, throughout the ages—with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art.
—Hilton Kramer reviewing “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago in The New York Times in 1980
As for Ms. Chicago, she said that despite the art media’s early disparagement of her work, her way of overcoming the disappointment was to go into her studio and continue making art.
—Kasia Pilat reviewing the exhibit “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making” in The New York Times in 2018
On we go, trailing behind our vaginas,
standard bearers, chained to them
like performance artists. Our vaginas
take us up on podia, behind Bunsen burners.
We follow them into combat, into
our studios, up to whiteboards. Our vaginas
drive mini-vans and fill shopping carts.
We teach them to clench, to vibrate
like struck tuning forks. We bleed and push
children from their split lips. Our vaginas
get us locked up, fabric-shrouded, monitored,
kidnapped. We hurry them home at night,
quick as quick, from subway platforms.
Our vaginas are forever fending off intruders.
At work, we trail them into smaller offices.
We cohabit on our smaller paychecks.
There’s something fishy about them, some
insidious funk that frightens. We tamp them
down, ramp them up, spinning their dial
with the precision of safe-crackers.
Our vaginas were the first unearthed totems
and will be the last things humans bow to
as we outlive our tenancy on this mothership.
Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, Oregon. Her poems of protest have appeared previously in What Rough Beast as well as in The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, and more.
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