Everything Women Won. Everything Under Attack. And Why We Keep Going.
A Poem for International Women's Day, 2026
On International Women’s Day, 2026
I. The Archive Speaks First (1776 — )
From dependent
to citizen
to rights-holder in every sphere
to we are still fighting about whether
the rights will be enforced, funded, protected.
¹ ¹ ¹
The arc is long.
The arc is also a wound that keeps reopening.
II. A Partial Inventory of What Was Won
(read slowly — each line cost someone everything)
The right to vote, in New Zealand, 1893.
The right to stand for office.
The right to own land, inherit, refuse marriage.
The right to your own passport.
The right to say ‘no’ inside a marriage — and have it mean no.
The right to your own body — still contested, still bleeding.
The right to walk across a city alone.
The right to education — revoked in Afghanistan, presently, in this century, now.
The right to a name on a peace treaty.
The right to name the violence done to you.
The right not to be a paper lantern in a storm.
III. Footnotes as Center
[fn. 1: UN Women, March 2026 —
no country has reached full legal equality for women and girls.
approximately 1 in 4 countries reported active backlash in 2024.]
[fn. 2: The Epstein files are not a footnote.
They are the main text.
The main text has always been:
who owns the body of a girl,
and who is protected when he does.]
[fn. 3: The Epstein class is not past tense.
At least one of them is currently a president.
Several more are influential.
The files are open.
The men are not.]
IV. A Queer Interruption
What if we stopped calling this
Women’s Rights
as though it were a niche concern —
a sub-committee
of the main human project —
when the main human project
has always included
the systematic arrangement of bodies
into those who are protected
and those from whom protection is withheld?
(That is not a metaphor.
That is a filing system.
That is a guest list.
That is a flight log.)
V. The Backlash, Named
Argentina: femicide removed from the penal code.
Afghanistan: girls, books, voices, streets — all revoked.
United States: women dying of preventable causes
inside the gap where a law used to be.
Russia: incitement to abortion — a crime.
Everywhere: institutions defunded, civil society
slowly swallowed by the dark.
This is the part of the poem that is not a poem.
This is the part that is just true.
VI. And Still — the Polyvocal Turn
(because formally promiscuous work holds this: the grief and the momentum, together)
They marched in Buenos Aires and called it Ni Una Más.
They marched in Lagos and Lahore and Nairobi.
They wrote testimony and bore witness
and built shelters and passed legislation
and held the line at a thousand
ordinary 3am moments
when holding the line
looked like staying alive.
Sojourner Truth said: Ain’t I a woman?
She said it to a room that had already decided the answer.
She said it anyway.
VII. To the Girls Not Yet Named Here
This poem knows it is incomplete.
The women who built this arc
were also incomplete — partial, contradictory,
sometimes complicit, sometimes visionary,
sometimes both at once.
What they left us:
not a finished world.
A direction.
A because we said so.
A because we kept saying so.
A because the saying is also a kind of architecture.
VIII. Coda: What Hope Looks Like in 2026
Not naive.
Not the absence of the flight logs.
Not pretending the files don’t exist
or that the Epstein class
has been adequately named and held.
Hope, today, looks like:
knowing what was won —
knowing what is under attack —
knowing the difference between
this is over
and this is not over yet —
and choosing, with full information,
to keep building anyway.
To be a Canyon:
shaped by what moved through you,
not destroyed by it.
Stable.
Deep.
Still here.
For every woman who kept the archive.
For every woman the archive failed.
For every girl who didn’t get to choose.
International Women’s Day, 8 March 2026.
“No country has reached full legal equality for women and girls.”
— UN Women, March 2026
The arc bends toward justice
only because someone is bending it.
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Brilliant work!
Wonderful!
Thank you for writing this!
“The arc bends toward justice
only because someone is bending it.”
Yes! We are bending it!!