Brooke Forbes

Women’s bodies are torn apart on the daily, in the news and in the streets.
They’re dragged through games and gambling,
Surviving violence and ridicule,
Pushed in one direction then the next.

Women’s bodies are sold and owned,
Through histories and cultures that shape our perceptions of old ticking time and place.

They’re remade, restructured, brought through the same unavoidable narrative and compartmentalised in fading mantlepiece photographs.

Women’s bodies are toys.
They’re pulled like little rag dolls,
They’re picked up like puppets with pigtails and painted faces,
They’re torn apart like a dog’s bone.

Women’s bodies are politicised and tormented;
Drugged,
Misused,
Forgotten.

Women’s bodies are taken from positions of power with a mighty thump,
Punished for ever trying in the first place.
They’re isolated and mocked,
Mimicked and downplayed,
Reminded of their position as the second sex.

And when we are ready, we dispose of images of women’s bodies.
Our bins are lined with newspaper stories of their forgotten wants and dreams:
Pictures of women in long slinky dresses, see through blouses and dainty pearls.
Pictures of women in kitchen settings, upholding a never-ending suburban dream.
Pictures of women in lycra bikinis, pushing tight against exposed flesh, objects for hungry eyes.

We live through women’s bodies.
We take their warmth, their good nature, their strengths and make them our own.
We take the stories of young women and line them against stereotypes.
We take the stories of middle-aged women and tell them their ambition in fruitless.
We take the stories of old women and retell them for them, preventing a reliable narrative.

When are ready we burry women’s bodies in soft soil, deep with ancestorial lineage.
We plant trees on top and hope the new life will somehow carry forth a better story than what’s forgotten beneath.
We hope the roots will wrap around aching bones left behind after a life filled with longing and quashed ambitions, thoughts of becoming powerful only to left to the rot.

When we are ready we tell stories about past women’s bodies.
We tell children and men that this woman was pure, this woman was righteous, a prime example of rose-tinted feminine, a woman of depth and spirit.
Pioneering, we would say, a leader of sorts.

It’s only at night that women can tell the truth,
Women to women, ancestors visiting in the pitch velvet black of night.

When we are ready, we dream of women’s bodies.
Speaking softly first then roaring deep into the night.
We dream of all the things lost and all the things taken.
We dream not of triumph or might or dominance,
But of alternative endings and unlived stories of connection and meaning,
Woven like dark tapestries across skin types and body shapes.

When we are ready, women’s bodies are set free,
From lives laid down for others and backstories that no longer serve them.

Women’s bodies are released,
Into the ether with lessons softly whispered,
And paths forward gently rewritten.

If only, we could catch them, maybe just for a moment,
And hear the weight of generations ebbing forward,
Minds and wants and beings,
Now free.

Artwork: Colleen Wallace Nungarrayi, Dreamtime Sister