A poet asked to see my manuscript Crude after praising my writing and telling me I should write a whole collection about my family history. (That’s exactly what Crude is.) After I sent it to them, they asked me if I wanted feedback on the collection. I told them I did not.

But they couldn’t resist giving me feedback they knew I didn’t want. Today, I received an email with the subject line felt like I had to give SOME kind of a response. They led by saying they were almost sorry they asked to read Crude. They then infantalized me using an image from the collection, characterizing me as a little girl who’s always ready for a fight, suggested I rewrite the collection as poetry alternating with prose, said I should add a poem about my father’s death, provided instruction about where to put that poem in the collection, and, as a capper, shared a poem they wrote based on my life and experience, titled “Oklahoma Crude,” I guess to show me how it’s done, since I apparently don’t know how it’s done.

Some of you really don’t see what you’re doing, do you? How you’re coming across? What impulses you can’t contain and how much you’re reacting to your own anima, not the women and female-bodied folks around you, who you confuse for that anima. You really think we’re just super upset out of nowhere all the time for no discernible reason, which is proof we are like children, not adults, not fully grown women or female-bodied humans. To you who see us this way, we are, as this poet said in their email, Silvia Plath [sic] drowning in Lake Texhoma [sic]. *

No we aren’t. We aren’t any of that. I’m here as a witness and as a testament to the fact that you have us all wrong and always have and always will. As long as there is past and future, you will have gotten and will continue to get us wrong.

We deal with this shit from you all the time. All the freaking time. We are tired. I am tired.

So that’s the other part of how my day is going. The first part is the extermination order directed at those who are unhoused, have mental-health issues, and have substance-abuse issues. I mean the executive order. My bad. Incarcination and institutionalization aren’t extermination. At least not yet.

Here’s the thing: You don’t get to angle to move a conversation from a public to a private space using the false pretense of wanting to read my poetry collection, use that privacy to say things that are inappropriate, then claim that private space is privileged and protected and that what you say within it can’t be called out or shared. That’s not how things work. You certainly don’t get to frame me as doing something even worse to you than what you did to me or pressure me to remove your name from my assessment and commentary about what you did. And I didn’t share what you did with friends. I shared it with our mutual writing and poetry community because it’s important for people to know what men like you are doing within that community. They can make up their own minds about you, as I have.

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* It’s Sylvia and Texoma.