Dear Mom and Dad,
 
All my rights are alienable. That I hold onto them for the time being is material. I might pull my breast out and shriek when it’s offended. I might not pull my breast out. My breast is small, targeted, fetid, prudish, hot to the touch, infected, swarming, bedecked, pierced through, has sleep in the eye, makes it clear that I am on borrowed time. All my privileges are plenty suckled up around me at night in the bed when I dream of getting out of here of getting a pretty boyfriend who loves my face when I dream of getting in good with all the girlbangfutures and forming a party, and I dream of the dress I will wear to the emancipation of all bad feelings. I pray to be a beautiful actress and model whom everyone loves and also for all the cats to be relieved of their despair and the dog never to suffer loneliness and also for all the strangers whose diseases and failures I’m unable to catalogue. My prayer is addressed to the heart of the construction, to the gear from which all shafts emanate. I am a white girl in a headdress. Costume is a privilege. As are ostrich feathers as are gestures made with the ringed hand as are tilts of the head. My privilege gets sawn in half two-for-a-quarter and I gape in mirrors at my own torso mounted on a butcher block trolley. Time and a half for
 
Your Ugly Little,
Scab
 

 

 

 

 
Dear Mom and Dad,
 
I’ll say this once: I’m an only child. No matter how many siblings you cook up in there, no one else will ever site you. No one else will play your mumblety-peg. It’s always you and me alone in this gray metal drawer, bare bulb fetal scissors above us. I will go decades without input from the sibyls. I will gird my house with salt. When the time comes that it is no longer feasible to love you, I’ll walk willingly into that severed state that is either real or Freud’s hoodwink or whatevs, Mom and Dad.
 
Your,
Ugly Little Scab
 

 

 

 

 
Dear Mom and Dad,
 
Here is a story: once upon a time a flab went walking in the wooded valley near her cottage. In the wooded valley, she came upon three pennies and a bear. The bear said, these are my sister’s eyes and her heart, help me return them to the sky. The flab said nothing, for she didn’t speak bear. Give me your hand, flabby, said the bear, and the flab said nothing, though she held out her hand, which was scarred from hot water and clenching a map. Open your mouth, flabby, said the bear, and the flab said nothing, but opened her mouth to receive the three pennies. The bear tossed her high onto his back, where she wrapped her scarf around his neck to make the reins. The sun thudded into the wood and the bear leapt into the sky.
 
Every single constellation tells the story.
 
Your Ugly Little,
Scab
 

 

 

 

 
Dear Mom and Dad,
 
It’s language city. The cabal of nouns that does me in. They come toward me trailing their scents, a dead spaniel with his even more dead pheasant, whose wheels squeak, their slight flavor of metal on metal, metaphor loosing its linen. They stitch me into the hemispherical past. I’m not your girl, nor huffy king Henry’s. Born in any other time, I’d have been just this raw mistake. The swan’s wing crushing the fluted edge on the first attempt.
 
Your Ugly Little,
Scab
 

 

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Danielle Pafunda’s books include Manhater (Dusie Press Books), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), and Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books). She’s an editor at Coconut Magazine and teaches for the University of Wyoming.

 

Note: The first piece and particularly the phrase “all my rights are alienable” is inspired by Roxane Gay’s essay on The Rumpus, “The Alienable Rights of Women.”