World of Women: Volume III

The final strike of the female flame

A rose by any other (our) name

Image by Felix Young.

When God Woke as Woman - The Dope Doula

when god first spoke there was no thunder
there was a lullaby;
a whisper woven into womb.
creation did not begin with a command
it was born with a contraction
they say god is power
but forget that power often bleeds
they kneel before a man on a cross
but flinch at a woman in labour
they sing of miracles
only if they come with robes and rituals
but ignore how blood becomes breath
how hips open like altars

when god woke as woman
she was not meek
she was molten
not tender
but tectonic
she did not ask to lead
she simply stood
and the earth realigned
yet still they try to quiet her
shrink her divinity into docility
etch halos
only on heads that bow
but god never bowed;
she birthed
and bled
and bore
and in her bearing
became holy
because what could be more sacred
than the body that holds life and death
with equal grace?
they call it blasphemy to speak of god as woman
but I have seen her
in the mirror
in the kitchen
in protest
in prayer
in love

not a symbol
not a myth
but flesh and bone
and perhaps that is why they fear her?
not because she is absent
but because she is
everywhere

© The Dope Doula 2025

Image by Pitt Rom.

We Are Women - Laura Catanzano

I am Woman.
Heed my rule.
Households, sky-highs, democracies,
hindered only by this glass ceiling,
motivated solely by my will to break it.

She is Woman.
Watch her transform.
Cheeks of rouge, color of confidence, self-assured
steps clear a path for those to follow,
beauty trailing in her wake.

We are Women.
Watch us create.
Natural instinct and nourishing breast,
our bodies a temple, a home,
giving life inside our wombs.

I am Woman.
Make me cower.
Your fist, your words, your influence
you use your weight to crush me,
my spirit weakens, but does not break.

They are Woman.
Feel them tempt.
Curves of hips, soft belly, subtle sensuality
intoxicating words to bind,
their femininity a spell you long for.

We are Women.
Break the mold.
Myself, our children, this landscape
the very earth beneath your feet,
Evolutionary generations' pull.

We are women.
and together,

ROAR.

© Laura Catanzano 2025

Image by Helen Gezer.

All That She Was - Andy Edge

I wanted to write something bold, and beautiful,
and meaningful
about living most my life as a woman.
And yet for days, when I sat down to write it,
this was the only thing I could put on the page:

It was EXHAUSTING…

For years I carried her name
like a coat that never fit right,
shoulders pinched, sleeves too long,
but everyone said it looked beautiful on me.

They taught her life goals early
Marry a man. Have babies. College isn’t for girls like you.

The questions started young and never stopped,
When do you want kids?
Have you picked out baby names?
What kind of engagement ring do you like?
As if her whole life was just preparation
for something she was supposed to want.

She learned to fold herself small,
to swallow her ambitions whole,
to measure her worth in wedding rings
and nursery rhymes.

SHRINKING

Legs pressed together like a prayer,
every word an apology,
always asking permission
to take up space in rooms
belonging to everyone but her.

The summer she was thirteen,
her best friend Melanie discovered boys
and overnight, their bikes and creek water
became mascara tutorials
in Melanie’s pink bedroom.

At sixteen, she let him touch her tits in his car
because all her girl friends
had been “doing things” for years,
and said she’d love it and
when it was over, she lay there
thinking This is it?

She learned the rules of being a female,
Hold your keys between your fingers.
Never leave your drink alone.
Game with your mic muted,
you know what happens when they hear a girl.

She learned how to laugh at jokes that weren’t funny,
how to be silent when men spoke over her.

Be SWEET.
Be SMALL.
Be GRATEFUL.

Don’t ask for too much.
Don’t want too much.
Don’t BE too much.

I mourn the time she lost
sitting in the back row,
raising her hand tentatively,
always second-guessing
the brilliance burning
behind her perfect smile.

I ache for the dreams
she swallowed whole,
the ambitions she renamed
selfish and unrealistic
because good girls
don’t forget their place.

I rage for the babies
she tried to make,
three rounds of IVF
like Russian roulette,
ten small lights
flickered and went out
before they could learn
their own names,
never to be born.

She tried so hard
to do what she was told.

This is what women DO.
This is your PURPOSE.

She sobbed the day
she gave them her uterus,
not from sadness
but relief,
finally rid of the part
that had become
a graveyard
of expectations.
She handed it over
like evidence
of a crime
she didn’t commit.

She stayed trapped in the story
where women who can’t make babies
are somehow less,
somehow failing at the one thing
they’re told matters most.

Until she couldn’t get out of bed anymore,
until all that failing
held her so deep into the mattress
she thought if she lay still enough,
quiet enough,
small enough,
she could DISAPPEAR FOREVER.

Even the strongest stone will crack under pressure,
and one day
she saw past the costume
to the stranger who had been waiting
patient,
quiet,
watching her struggle every day.
He hated what she wore,
the life she learned to perform so well,
listening to all the lies he couldn’t stand,
while whispering truths she wasn’t ready to hear,
This doesn’t fit. This was never yours. There’s another way to be.

And when she stood at the threshold,
one foot in each world,
everyone wanted to know
Are you happier now?
As if happiness were a door
you walk through once
and close behind you forever.

But the truth is messier than that.
The truth is I grieve her,
not because she was right,
not because she was beautiful,
not because she tried to do everything
they expected her to do
and failed,
but because she was mine.

She was mine and I was hers
and we did the best we could.
We survived so many years
of ma’am and miss and you’d be prettier if you smiled
and she can’t, won’t, will never
just disappear
and
I thank her.
I thank her for surviving long enough
to bring me here.
I thank her for her strength.
I thank her for keeping us safe.

© Andy Edge 2025

Image by Alena Yanovich.

Reparations Equals Repair - Libby Walkup

Can we—please—
fast forward to the part of history
in which those of us with uteruses
are paid for existing?

Paid for cramps, bloating, bleeding,
—the emotional roller coaster that is
menstruation. The thousands spent
on pads, tampons, cups,
and underwear.

Paid for the nine months—times
number of babies—our bodies
permanently twist and change
and morph in ways that shouldn't
be possible while we grow the next
generation of thinkers, scholars,
workers, politicians.

The swollen ankles
the extra food
the late night cravings
the pain
the discomfort
the sleepless nights
the morning sickness.

Paid for complications
emergency c-sections
and the endless grief in
miscarriages and stillborns.

Paid for perimenopausal
night sweats
hot flashes
mood swings
achy joints
debilitating brain fog
—the sheer unadulterated rage
that we neatly tuck away to remain
polite in company.
The lack of care, knowledge,
and concern, as our bodies
morph once again
into something new.

Reparations for the centuries
in lost income, ownership of our
homes, our land, the businesses we
worked hard to build, and our own
bank accounts because our
husbands or fathers died
before us and we were not
allowed by law to own
anything.

In fact—we too were (are?) property.

Reparations for the centuries
of unpaid labor and lesser
paid labor and slave-labor
and sex-work-labor.

The house-care labor
on top of the family admin labor
on top of the childcare-labor
on top of the baby-daddy-
emotional-labor—living
in bodies that are maxed out
on patriarchal, white
supremacy trauma.

What compensation
is reasonable
for being at risk
of rape or
murder at the hands
of our husbands,
fathers, brothers,
male cousins,
male friends,
and the odd
psycho-killer-
serial-rapist.

What kind of tax is appropriate
for every male mouth
that ever told a woman to smile—
commented on her ass as
she ran to catch a train
home after dark.

The men who have followed
us down streets.

The men who have touched
without consent.

The lovers who have been so toxic
and insecure they’ve manipulated—
used—
abused.

What could possibly repay
the stripping away
of autonomy and agency
by fathers who taught
us to fear and obey them.
To defer to them.
To never say no
to them.

This is how the best minds
of my generation
have been destroyed—
appeasing
pleasing
freezing
raging
to survive in systems
that have stripped us
and killed us
—brainwashed itself
into believing that domination
is the single, solitary way
to build a bridge,
but it only destroys them.

And—who's to compensate us
for the hard labor
of learning to love ourselves
when no
one
showed
us
how?

© Libby Walkup 2025

Image by Lokman Sevim.

The Law of Intensity - Edward Swafford

Rectangular rendezvous with a prized
possession, processions at right angles
WRONG reticent handling of her halo
halogen markers marked by bullseyes
of the miscreant male gaaaaaaaaaaaze
myopic metamorphosis, dazed & dewy
fascinatrix fashion-forward short skirt
androcentric apathy.

She’s unseen, quixotically focused on
purveyors of pasts, ghosts of guilt guile
smiles as a runaway tiptoeing D-O-W-N
runways conveying faux fractions, pose
femininity on conveyor belts of thinner
is tethered to toxic quantum quandary
taut tears, shell-shocked ire snapshots
PULSE, as hers races.

Glossed and glamorous, so Amazonian
in stature and stilettos, deception unto
inceptions of womanhood yet she’s shy
of seventeen, an entity of erudition cast
as a tame tamer in castes of razor wire
castigated by djinn dens, nascent nests
of supersonic stares ensnared by apex
predators predating compasses.

Sashay South, no, North, no rush they
own her sense of self, sealed with her
suffragette signature ON misogynistic
scripture, chauvinistic show ponying
sunsetting corrosive clauses of youth
that’s the lay of the land, these are the
lissome lithe lessons learned in tomes
this is the law of intensity.

© Edward Swafford 2025 - Originally published in Fourth Wave and revamped for Black Coffee Poetry.

Image by magapls.

00 - Maggie McCombs

I was made with shapes
but crossed them out
with tallies screaming,
Mother Nature, remake me:

Maybe not less woman, but please,
less person,
So we flattened into a double zero,
low-rise,
and I drew myself new with lettuce and vinegar
until the church ladies whispered.

A strict diet of dysphoria, yes,
but I still don’t know whether it was for
thinness or some gender in absentia,
left trainless in some faraway station.

...

But I don’t care:
I am reinvention!
So I drew myself
a line — nine and a seven
angled over the scale,
97, slouching into oblivion:
Took a mallet to the tumorous hips
Mom said made me woman.

She said she’d take me to a clinic
if I skipped another meal.
I’d give anything to believe it:
because Mother I love you,
but if you meant that you should have
committed me right then.

...

I’ll be my own mom:
Enough of denying myself:
I checked myself in and
I opened my mouth and ate -
Every mouth, and ate,
bereft of nothing.

Mother, I made a fetus, nameless,
from ellipses: witness
my new dimensions!
Subcutaneous ovoids
whorl over me en masse –
& multiply for your viewing pleasure.

I swole twice my original size
and they hated it,
said I was unrecognizable,
because I learned how
Woman looks on me:
a magnolia unfurling
like my real name:

a woman, if only for
how I consume.
A woman, too, for how
it wears on the body
and everyone watches.

...

Now we go shopping
And she tells me which dresses
are flattering, also, where I overflow:
“You didn’t get those from me.”
I nod, remembering I grew them.

Mom I love you but maybe look at what we’ve done
in this act of co-creation, we've made of me a spectacle
shedding a too-small dress
on an outlet-mall floor...
and I’m reminded of how orbular
a double zero
looks on paper and wonder too
at the irony of this
surrender:
How orthorexia feels as
strict like it sounds.

...

I share the politics of starving
but she’s still proud of how I’ve morphed again,
drawing my circles more taut with tirzepatide.

It’s the artist that they look at:
they squeeze me into whalebone
and gawk at the specimen under the syringe.

Now I insist: I'll be the subject
and sit for my own portrait: Mother, nature,
take from me the sickness, the tightening strings!
Let me marvel at how I change shapes with every iteration.

© Maggie McCombs 2025

Image by Tiến Nguyễn.

Jaguar - Samara

If the baby sleeps
more than three hours
my tits become
tense, terrifying
little pomegranates
that spurt when
she stirs.
She wakes &
milks me &
I am relieved.

In the beginning
before I loved you yet
I watched telenovelas
while you were at the tit.
Now I watch you
twirl your hands
in the air
raise your fists
above your head
roll your eyes back
as you suckle.
What could be more
delightful or interesting
than this?

Yet my mind
is still a jaguar
pacing, prowling
my tight perimeter.
The current of power
brimming, bloodthirsty
impatient.

Today I remind myself:
jaguars have young.
Huntress & mother
are one beast,
not two.

© Samara 2025

Image by Marián Šicko.

Self-Actualized - Samantha Lazar

my perimenopausal egg has more value
than the unbalanced
atmospheric greenhouse air It will
never breathe

It has more unfought-for rights
than the unfocused student, the anxious, the shy
the sky-gazing shopper choosing
between meds or lights

It has more clout
than the farmed-fish in greed-polluted
waters where It will
never be baptized

It has more authority
than the hate-laced fertilizer
demanding entrance to a club
for the generationally-traumatized

It has more weight
than the gravity of raising kids
to be self-actualized when it is so hard
to be human in this world

© Samantha Lazar 2025

Image by Zekai Zhu.

HER - H. R. Sinclair

I am here
because of her
I am me
because of her
not by simple laws of biology
but by the grit and grift she bears
by the bite she’s has and had to
and by the restraint she practices

I am here
not because of him
not even in spite of him
but because of her
In her totality
by the will of her
by the sacrifices
the selflessness
the strength

When one left
she stayed
when one left three
she made the three stronger
than four could have ever be
and because of the one who stayed
I am here.

I am still here
because of her
I became more
because of her
not by mere fantasy or fun
but by the boundless love she bears
by the presence she has
and by the future she sees
I am here
not because of me
but in spite of me and my thoughts
because of what she thought
and held true
and held me to

When no other could
When no hope stayed
When all light had left
When one decision was left
She came with more
Shone light on pathways
Showed futures brighter
And stayed

I am here because she stayed
I am still here because she stayed
I am me because of their love

To the two women who made me the man I am
I owe my life and bow soul to you in gratitude

© H. R. Sinclair 2025

Image by Lokman Sevim.

The Magic of Mother Nature -Laney Mills

The winds that blow
through the trees,
refreshes our soul
heals our wings.

The Sun’s warm rays
melt the stress
that stiffens our muscles
and slows our steps.

Where would we be
without the leaves on the trees?
Without the Sun and the Moon
and the evening breeze?

We would be lost and lonely,
no life, no “we”
The Earth would be barren,
neither lush nor green.

What is life
that we need her?
Her rhythm,
her consistency, her color?

She is Mother Nature,
born of the Spirit, free!
God, from the beginning of time,
ordained thee.

© Laney Mills - Originally published in Laney’s Words Poetry and revamped for Black Coffee Poetry.

Image by Jay Soundo.

Allure - Maisie Archer

Disabuse yourself of the temptation
to imagine my secret, smooth coiffure
no one dare use me to spark elation
bright skin, long lashes add to my allure -
beware, I am brash as well as demure.
This colorful warmth wears my seclusion
imposed, chosen, it is no illusion.
Behind soft shades like a many-hued moth
the depth of my soul safe from intrusion.
I choose what to share within this bold froth.

© Maisie Archer 2025

Image by Pixabay.

Lessons From the Seed - Silva Mirovics

The seed, miniscule in size, and against all odds, and impossible for my mind to conceive begins to sprout, and begins its journey through the cold, dark soil blindly pushing ahead instinctively aware of its direction in life. For a moment I imagine sinking to the depths of the ocean floor cold, dark and alone desperate to find my way, to reach the top, impatient, and gasping for air. Yet the sprout knows no desperation no impatience it pushes on, breaks free cracks through the ground, a sound my ears cannot hear the sun welcomes it to the earth’s surface. The seed is home now with roots deeply anchored into the cool, rich soil. Above ground, free to reach its full potential free to be to realise its true expression. Seed sprout seedling plant … … your very growth is simply part of the order of all things. Only we have lost touch with who we really are.

© Silva Mirovics 2025

Image by Cottonbro Studio.

Echo State (Feminine Conditioning) - Adrian Njoto

My mind wanders at night,
allowing my body to fall into slumber.
It's the quiet hums that make every meaning
leave my earthly cocoon.

My soul cracks
as my father speaks in tongues—
beautiful, deadly, all in-between.
Glossolalia all the same.

It tears me open,
unravels every seam,
leaving only a few threads to hold onto,
before it rebuilds me—
softer, more... obedient-
harmless, more... d o c i l e.

My poisoned mind is now filled
with sweet nothings,
insincere gratitudes.
Heart becomes a disdainful simulacrum
Reality becomes an unending conundrum.

And I'm left an empty being—
a girl with a gape
that echoes praises.

Try me with a hello,
and I’d say that back.
Echolalia forever.

Now hit me—
but I won't hit back.
I was taught trained not to.

This emptiness is a sickness
I've mistaken for bliss.
The solace I long for is hidden away.

Negate! Negate! Negate!

It has (always) been the emptiness that speaks,
because self-erasure is
e n c o u r a g e d.

I am the mouthpiece of the abyss—
the instrument of the void—
one's own quest for nothing.

I can’t talk.
I only repeat.

© Adrian Njoto 2025

Image by Cottonbro Studio.

She's the Millennia's DESIGN - Ral Joseph

"It's a man's world"

She was scathed with piercing words
She was stripped naked of inheritance
Raped while suffocating and dying
Is
She 
Dead?

Dragging the grasses, dragging the door
Pulling on Fendi and Prada
Adorned with resilience
Proposed
Thesized
Proven

Saving tradition from sacrifices with salvation
Saving society from death with meekness
Saving religion from hell with virtuousness
Saving him from absolution with spiced love

"It's truly a man's world"

God called her mother
Earth called her eve
Men called her woman

She's water floating on soil
She's a symbol
She's a flag

She's 
_____the decades ART
She's 
_____the century's LITERATURE
She's 
_____the millennia's DESIGN

In Dior and Gucci
In a man's world
Revolving round a woman's planet.

© Ral Joseph 2025

Brushstrokes of thy women

*Video embeds courtesy of Cottonbro Studio