After Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses”, “Some Girls”, is a piece about women, their beauty, and their worth.

Some girls are birds of morning 
Some girls are sirens of night  
Some girls are made of stars 
Some girls are basins of tears  
 
I am not these girls  
 
Some girls are fat  
Some girls are thin  
Some girls don’t own a scale 
Some girls have never lived without one  
 
I am not these girls  
 
Some girls are pretty 
Some girls are plain 
Some girls glow like a red moon  
Some girls dull like a forgotten pond 
 
I am not these girls  
 
Some girls stuff their bras 
Some girls suffocate their legs  
Some girls cage their stomachs  
Some girls starve their guts  
 
I am not these girls  
 
Some girls have hair that breezes like wind 
Some girls have eyes like the sky 
Some girls have hair that curls like waves  
Some girls have eyes like the sun 
Some girls have hair that defies gravity,  
Some girls have eyes like death 
 
I am not these girls 
 
Some girls are little girls, wrapping their heads with towels, squealing at their inches 
Some girls scream as relaxer burns fester 
Some girls sizzle curls till they’re straight as bone 
Some girls watch their hair wither and fall out 
 
I am these girls  
 
Some girls have “dirt skin” so  
Some girls scrub until skin bleeds raw 
Some girls rub chemical cream until melanin disappears 
Some girls hide from the sun  
 
I am these girls  
 
Some girls hear, “you don’t have enough for a man to grab on to” 
Some girls hear, “how can you have no ass-you’re black”  
Some girls hear, “your body is a distraction”  
Some girls hear, “you will never be pretty enough to love”  
 
I am, I am 
I am these girls   
 
I am a girl who sucks in her stomach  
I am a girl who is skin and bones  
I am a girl who stuffs her pants because  
I am a girl who hates her hips  
I am a girl who longs for Beyonce-Hair but 
I am a girl who will never have it 
I am a girl who is made of tears  
I am a girl with eyes like death  
I am a girl who will never be beautiful enough to love  
 
I am these girls  
I am, I am 

Process

I wrote this poem in my junior year of high school, when I was beginning to grasp onto the concepts of poetry. In class, my poetry teacher was giving my class lessons on anaphora poems, and she used Joy Harjo’s, “She Had Some Horses” as an example. I was immediately drawn to the form and the way she revealed the emotional ideas in the poem, and attempted to emulate it. Very rarely will I say that a poem comes naturally to me, but this one did. In my first drafts, my poetry teacher pointed out that the order in which I was revealing the information didn’t serve what I was trying to accomplish. She pointed out to me that I was trying to show the experiences of all women, but I was integrating the very specific experiences of Black girls and women. She told me, that I had an opportunity here to work from the outside in, to show the struggles of all women, then narrow it down to the experiences of Black women, and then of myself. What I have now, is one of my most vulnerable, and perhaps most important poems I have created.