Today, I met a girl named Tyranny

and I hoped I misheard her. T E E R A N E E or some flowery, incorrect spelling of a word that still cuts like a guillotine. Spelled in bubble letters on pink construction paper, she said it again, Tyrant. A word just recently covered in dust, but a dust from the powder of bourgeoisie wigs as they fell from necks into baskets. Tyrant. A noun still lounging on iron thrones, or atop a fifteen-foot mound of the skulls of Serbian serfs who dared say the word with spit and fire first. Tyrant, since then, doesn’t sparkle like Princess or King or Queen, but shrieks like a bastard baby dashed against a brick wall to preserve the word Tyrant, and its repertoire,  “Let them eat cake” The slashing of throats, The stoning of wives, The mounting behind them of the preserved heads of William Wallace and Anne Boleyn and the entire collection of Maori leaders who, in their tongues, spat the same talon back: Tyrant still marks their purple, crusted lips as it exited the lips of a mother in the late 90’s who held a sniffling infant in her arms, kissed her head, and whispered warmly, “Tyrant” Like the one sitting in front of me today, rolling her eyes and sucking on a lip piercing, the skulls on her t-shirt undoubtedly those of Serbian serfs or separatists. Clearing her throat and bellowing like a monarch, she told me again  “I am Tyranny” I fell to my knees And bowed before her.