Poor Chicken

“You pluck a chicken” is
what my best friend’s
lady bus driver told us
when Courtney said she needed
to remove her regrown eyebrow hairs.
One manicured hand on the steering wheel,
she went on trying to correct us,
as if eleven-year-olds could
pick up on the semantics
of womanhood.
“You tweeze your eyebrows.”
Oohhh…
We all thoughtfully nodded
at her preaching the
Gospel of Cosmo.
As if we’d been conditioned
our whole girlhood
to be good cogs of capitalism,
purchasers of glitter and goo
for the security of the willfully blind patriarchy.
“Let me see,” she held Courtney’s face
between the L of her thumb and index,
then inspected her regenerative caterpillars.
“yea, you’ve got work to do,”
she said, knowing we must be forever revising
our consumable bodies.
As if to gain the guise of respect,
as a woman,
is only possible by
flaunting our proficiency
at disappearing.

Rebecca Short writes from her velvet heart. She is a Mother, and avid open mic attender, living in a rented old farmhouse in Fort Collins, Colorado with her partner and child. Her poem “Loving Like A Bird” won second place in the Colorado State Fair Poetry Competition in 2025. Rebecca has been published in the Gulo Gulo 2026 Anthology, Scribbled, and elsewhere.