A Confrontation

Your pen

Is a razor sharp knife

Selected to capture my essence

And create a version of me

Shelley’s monster

From your overstretched imagination

Piercing through the page

Into my skin

I bleed invisible ink

I show my scars to my mother

Through the phone screen

Her only words

Why didn’t you ask him

To draw you differently?

I search for consoling words

My stomach twists

With each embrace

And extended sympathy

Is this my projection?

On to an innocent man

Is this character a reflection of me?

I unpick parts of my identity

Questioning

And remembering

Nothing is without context

Re-reading the sketch

Meeting a caricature

Like ones I’ve seen

In history books

From advertisements

In the 1800s

In comes

A sleepless night

I send a paragraph

Days before

I am about to perform

You handed me

Your construction

This role

‘Created just for me’

Truly it was written

In a spur of late night laziness

A collection of your ignorance

Against the context

Of stereotypes

The comedy of the role

Reads like

She’s intense

Aggressive

Argumentative

Sassy

She’s a fighter

An zoological choreographer

She understands ‘barbarity’

She can bring out the ‘savagery’

Her lack of human qualities

Is the but of the joke

Before it was removed

For potential insensitivity

After the tossing and turning

The internalising

In black and white ink

I can finally see

Why this sat

In the pit my stomach

Eating at me like acid

On the phone to my father

He reminded me

I also play a role

In representing

My people

So choose wisely

by Ruby McKie