Katie Bickham: “While reading this week that the Mona Lisa had been smeared with cake by a man dressed as a woman in a wheelchair, a follow-up article also listed all of the times the smiling lady has been stolen or vandalized in the past, and it was quite a list. Sometimes the causes even seemed noble. But I always like to remember that every historical figure was also a person, and I imagined her as a person, and then as a woman in particular, forever smiling even has she spends the rest of her life behind glass, forever watching people alternately admire her or try to ruin her for daring to smile.” (web)
Katie Bickham: “When women are assaulted or raped, there seems to be a lot of pressure from friends, family, and even therapists to find peace, forgive, move on. When do women get a moment to be mad as hell for a change? Is it because vengeance isn’t feminine or attractive? Or is it because people know that if all of us who have ever been touched wrongly were to speak our own names all at once, the sheer volume of it would be deafening. This poem imagines that vengeance, that moment when finally, instead of being asked to heal and forgive, we are allowed the rage that is rightfully ours. We become the weapons that are used to take our power.” (web)
Katie Bickham: “Those of us who have been paying attention to mass shootings and working and calling out for years for something to be done legislatively—many of us at least—have checked out. Hopelessness has settled onto us like a heavy blanket, and there is a strange sense of finality in the air. Las Vegas is where we are. After Newtown, where else was there for us to go?” (website)
Katie Bickham: “Eating disorder is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate, and I have been wrestling with it for over a decade now. Disordered eating is one of the strangest mental illnesses, because it’s one that the sufferer almost always wants to have on some level. I’ve often felt addicted to anorexia and bulimia, strangely happy with the havoc they wreak on my body, hesitant to lay them aside and ‘grow.’ The strangest part of it is that I’m a feminist and support a woman’s control over her body and reject male-driven beauty norms. But still, I fight to shrink, to disappear. Then one day, a new therapist who I went to see when there was nothing left to do but die told me something that seemed to throw everything into reverse. She said, ‘You deserve to take up space in the world.’ That same week, I started graduate school and work on my first book of poems. I have grown—in every sense—but the desire is always there waiting.” (website)
Katie Bickham: “One of the reactions that has been the most galling to me regarding the election is shock. People are saying that our system is broken for a man like Donald Trump to be president. But the truth is, the system is working exactly as it was designed to, protecting the kinds of people who built it.” (website)