I am just a girl
By Srihitha Pallapothula
Discussed: misogyny, sexual content
This is a poem about Monica Lewinsky. I wrote this piece to reshape the narrative. Some parts in style after Eleanor Wikstrom.
God, you named me Monica.
God, I am asking you to ChanceMe,
to tell me my fate:
I am seventeen and almost an adult
I have black, shoulder-length hair
Eyes that shine brown in the sunlight
A 3.98 unweighted GPA
I’ve taken five AP classes
Work the afternoon shifts at Wendy’s
My favorite movie is Titanic—
God, forgive me.
I am rambling
This is what matters:
if a forty-something-year old man
who just happened to be president
dug his hairy paws inside of me
He would find,
resting in my belly,
The daughters of this name:
A black lace thong,
a cigar warm to the touch,
a navy blue dress
with a waterfall of cum
running down the front.
God, define me:
Am I a victim or a vixen?*
Predator or prey?*
Myself or a shadow of that woman,
the other Monica?
God, I cannot find you in the comments
of my Reddit ChanceMe post.
Reddit is not God.
Reddit is the two men,
masked faces in this endless sea of unknowns,
who don’t give me what I want:
The first asks for nudes,
pictures of me at my most vulnerable.
The second wants to suck on my toes.
Why is there an abundance of creepy men in the world?
Why is it that I am seventeen and none of the boys at school will even look at me?
Why is it that she is twenty-one and the entire world cannot take its eyes off of her?
I am guilty of trying Monica’s face on / of trying to witness the girl / behind the woman / behind the slut.
God, thank you for the gift of subtraction.
21 minus 17 is 4.
And when I was four,
I committed my first crime:
Aged four, my teacher asked me
What I wanted to be when I grew up,
And I said President of the United States,
And my teacher smiled so lovingly
I believed her…
I believed her when she said
maybe you’ll be our first lady president.
Thirteen years later,
and the only women in the White House are still wives and daughters,
What my teacher should’ve said instead was
Maybe you’ll be the first young girl to get the president impeached,
and maybe then the class would have clapped for me.
God, when you gave me this name,
you asked me
To shoulder the burdens of all Monicas.
To slut-shame us
for crimes never committed:
black lace thong,
cigar warm to the touch,
navy blue dress
with a waterfall of cum
running down the front.
To call us
sluts,
whores,
cunts.
God, I don’t know
if I’m a misogynist
or a masochist
or both.
God, my favorite hobby is cosplaying broken women.
There is something beautiful, even holy,
about claiming their worst parts for myself.
You know all about holiness, don’t you?
Watch as I line my lips with blood red lipstick.
Dab my cheeks with the whitest powder I can find.
Curl my lashes, drown them in black ink.
Draw in seductive cheekbones.
I am invisible,
and I am trying
so hard
to be seen.
Final touches:
Watch as I slide on a black lace thong.
Place a cigar warm to the touch
near my vagina,
the heat spreading across my thigh,
searing my skin,
burning my flesh.
Paint virgin white onto my navy blue dress
and pretend it’s his cum.
Watch as I smile into the mirror
the way I think Monica would
before another secret rendezvous.
Watch as I fail to look like her because…
I don’t feel innocent enough.
….I will never feel innocent enough.
I am guilty of trying Monica’s face on,
of trying to witness the girl
behind the woman
behind the slut.
Guilty of being a masochist,
Of trying to feel some kind of pain,
the same as Monica,
so that there is something sacred and shared between us
beyond the superficiality of our names,
or maybe not,
maybe I am just the girl rubbing the red off my lips,
smearing it across my face,
the girl who will fall asleep
looking like a crime scene.
God, I am seventeen and almost an adult,
and I am sick of trying to find myself
in NSFW subreddits,
the reflections of broken women,
the silent punishments for my only crime.
Damn it.
Burn the black lace thong.
Stomp out the cigar warm to the touch.
Incinerate the navy blue dress
with the waterfall of cum
running down the front.
God, I am just a girl.
—
A ChanceMe is a type of Reddit post where users share information about themselves and ask for something to be predicted, usually whether or not they will get into a certain college.
*=Lines from the Vanity Fair article “‘Who Gets to Live in Victimville?’: Why I Participated in a New Docuseries on The Clinton Affair” by Monica Lewinsky
Girls Write Now On the Other Side of Everything: The 2023 Anthology
Do you know what it’s like to communicate with your family across a salty ocean’s divide? Do you want the sun and moon to enter your home with stories written in embers? Do you seek voices that will punctuate the darkness? Welcome to the other side of everything. It’s the other side of silence, the other side of childhood, the other side of hate, the other side of indifference, it’s the other side of sides, where the binary breaks down. It’s a new paradigm, a destination, a different perspective, a mindset, a state of openness, the space between the endless folds in your forehead, hopes for tomorrow, and reflections on the past. This anthology of diverse voices is an everything bagel of literary genres and love songs, secrets whispered in the dark of night, conversations held with ancestors under the sea.
Process
This piece was inspired by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and revisiting it in the context of the Me Too era. Originally it was a flash fiction piece, but as I edited it, it evolved naturally into a poem.
Srihitha Pallapothula
Srihitha Pallapothula (she/her) is a high school junior based in California. She loves to delve into writing, a longtime passion of hers. Srihitha’s other interests include reading diasporic work, cooking fried snacks such as mushroom manchurian and writing lengthy, professional emails.
