On Seeing a Content Advisory in a Playbill

Published in Existere — Journal of Arts & Literature (Spring/Summer 2022)

I will give no content advisory.
No “this may be upsetting, so I totally understand if you need to step out.”
I will not understand.
Not to flatter myself (or raise false expectations).
I am not about to unleash hard-hitting, unflinching prose.
Nothing even approaching a verbal fist to the stomach—
but I wish I were, so I could say:
Sit the fuck down.

When my mother was in middle school in the 1940s,
she wanted to take Shop with the boys—not Home Economics with the girls.
Her request was denied.
When she asked why,
the principal said it was because boys use bad language down there—
language a lady shouldn’t hear.
My mother responded, “Shit, piss, fuck, cunt.”
Long story short, she took Shop that year.
Built a dollhouse with real electric lights that she
switched on and off with tiny dollhouse switches.
A house she wished she could shrink into,
a perfect, happy house.
While in the real world,
she learned to listen for the slamming of real doors,
the rush up real stairs,
to run for the bathroom if she thought she could make it—
(the only room with a real lock).
To brace for the real beatings if she couldn’t.
The beatings no one talked about.

That really has nothing to do with anything,
except to say that words are words, and fists are fists.
The word shit is a word. The word piss is a word. The word fuck is a word.
The word cunt is a word. The word bitch is a word. The word fist is a word.
The word rape is a word.
Except to say that, if I had it in me to write a verbal fist to the stomach, I would
so I could start by saying: Don’t you dare leave this room.
You are stronger than that.

Either that, or a request:
That all content advisories come with their own content advisory:

This piece will be preceded by a content advisory.
For anyone thrown into paralyzing depression
by hearing the myth perpetuated that
words and ideas can—indeed—break your bones,
or who gets anxiety attacks on witnessing
our complicity in our own infantilization,
or who has a hypersensitivity to the
dumbing down of discourse so as not to offend,
or who, upon seeing acts of intellectual suicide, curls into a fetal ball and
moans about the slow creep of Fascism—
You may want to step out now.
We will totally understand.