If the word for a gathering of men
can be called a threat,
then a group of white women
could be called a margin of error—
always late to the train, demanding
passage and taking seats without
reservation. The future is female, cosigned
by colorblind visions in which we
are all women, after all, where white
women speed past red lights without
incident whereas a black woman dies in jail
after getting pulled over for a turn signal.
We are all women in our pink pussy hats, as if pink,
as if pussy, were payment enough, in tender.
originally published in Reclaim: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry
Carla Sofia Ferreira is a Portuguese-American poet from Newark, New Jersey. Author of the microchap, Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press 2019), her poems and book reviews live in such lit communities as Cotton Xenomorph; underblong; The Rumpus; and Glass. A recipient of fellowships from DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Sundress Academy for the Arts, she is a co-editor for a forthcoming anthology of immigrant and first-generation American poetry whose proceeds will benefit RAICES. As a high school English teacher, she believes in kindness, semicolons, and that ICE needs to be permanently abolished.