Contrary to popular belief
Women know everything there is to know about construction
We know all too well
about calloused hands
About danger zones
The ones at a darkened alleyway,
Or outside a bar
Or inside a bar
Your abandoned drink is no longer yours
Or walking late at night
Or jogging early morning
Danger zones while going to work
at work,
Walking home,
Or to your car
Inside your car
Inside your own home,
Within your own voice
If you dare speak up about
The cut up hands from decades of uprooting
barbed wire around your own body
We know all too well about constructing
We’ve had to pave the roads we
want to walk on
And when
The architects and engineers
Set their price for blueprints,
Bidding our “no thank you’s” and clenched fists
For
A world that only embraces women who scrub walls and floors with silence
We built homes
like colosseums
that do not stand unless they echo our voices
We know all too well the time
those colosseums take to build.
The years it takes to
Pave roads while walking on them
Or build bridges from scratch that seem too familiar
To our mothers and grandmothers
When they recognize
and are baffled
at how even after spending years collapsing such as a world,
The one thing that remains is the glass ceiling.
Women understand construction from personal experience
It is too often that we are left with a burning building for a body
Shattered windows and blackened lungs
I’ve learned
No one
can chisel a skyscraper out of their spines better than
A woman
