What It Feels Like For A Girl

First, let's start with numbers:
Four drinks
Seventeen blocks
One ass sheathed in a thin layer of cotton.
There are a million leaves on the ground,
and an infinite sky overhead,
but this night does not belong to me,
it is not mine,
mine is the anxiety aching in my thighs as I walk quickly, faster, back out of this huge night, holding it in my lungs as I'm afraid to breathe, to attract attention, to exist,

I ride off my drunkenness like a mortal sin:
she who indulges asks for it.
I skim down the roads like evil is chasing me:
these roads hold only danger for my type.
Not the poetry of a quiet, clear November night and the songs of the empty streets at midnight.
I cannot not afford to pause and look around for fear of someone noticing, grabbing, forcing.
(In the mirror at the bar, my face appears sharp, dark, red and metal, defining me as all I am, a justification or not for what comes out of my mouth, and I am apologetic for it.)

I get the sense that the world does not want my kind in here,
will make things uncomfortable and difficult until I pay my bill and leave.

My neighborhood appears before me like a prayer: empty, dirty, no one I love is waiting. It is an escape from what I am not allowed to have.