I’m always a little angry. There is a punching bag hanging in my garage. I’m not one for the footwork but I hit hard. I can’t lift myself into the rafters, but I do sit-ups on a piece of plywood the size of a folding chair. The more stress, the higher I pull my hair. I am in an MFA program that required me to move to rural Illinois where last summer, nearly everyone in our program left. I stayed. Sat on my porch and waited. Now it’s September and still so hot in Southern Illinois, the open door won’t assuage the humidity, nor ease the swell of bug bites that welt and rise before free weights roll back into cooler corners.
*
I was never one to engage with violence. Never got mad. Even as a kid, my classmates would say mean shit just to see what it would take for me to break, but nothing ever worked. I didn’t justify my anger until I started writing and realized I had a lot to be angry about. Even when I went through two weeks of court-ordered anger management after a DUI, I lied to myself and assumed it was a mistake. I left it so far down, I forgot it had been reaching up to me like a limb I refused to use. I was naive. I was mad for my naiveté. I was mad for staying quiet, for living blind with my tongue tied.
*
The first UFC event I watched was a Ronda Rousey fight. Blue computer screen in the dark. She was beautiful. She scared me. I was both frightened and attracted to her. The frustration I was feeling in my writing workshop was mirrored by the shamelessness in a knockout. The precision and months of training it takes to throw a good hook. And the cheap shots— it eased my tribulating heart to go home and watch fights with a straight face until I didn’t miss my family. Until I got my sex drive back. Until I wasn’t ashamed for having one in the first place.
*
I throw red solo cups at my friend John in the English offices. I tell him we need to work on our precision while he punches them out of the air, balancing on a skateboard left by a negligent student. My friends and I are hurting; I know it from the poems they write. We wear it on our faces. I originally started watching fights to relate to my pain-faced friends. Now I watch them to heal. What does that say about me besides I live through battles?
*
Last winter, my cohort went to St. Louis for a poetry reading. After the venue, we walked past a restaurant with a stand-up chef—my height. I don’t remember tackling the chef but I brought him to the ground. Somewhere along the way I became rowdy and untamed. I never had a lot of friends. If you aren’t in some kind of agony, I can’t relate to you. As I get older, the friends I have phase out to those who are in pain and those who aren’t.
*
I’ve been gifted with brass knuckles to help me write. Initially, I used them to punch my legs, curious about my own strength. Then I slept with them on my right hand when I lived alone.
When I wear them, I’m holding a hand. It’s comforting and a little sad. I need that legitimacy.
*
This summer I went to the only bar in Carbondale that broadcasts fights. I drank beer I couldn’t afford. Watched hours of knockouts. I peeled the scabs off my knuckles like paint. Before Christmas break, there were lady fights all night and I was back at Wild Wings with the poets. Our internal instinct is to swing and bleed. We drink too much; alcoholism is in our genes. We talk about our absent families. The distance we keep from our mothers. Our hearts ache similarly and we can sit with our carnal hearts in our throats through five hours of fighting and bask in brief moments of compassion, submerged beneath chokeholds and arm bars.
*
I start to notice these patterns. When a fighter emerges, she’s laughing. She’s concerned. They call this the zone. They’re clothed. Anamorphic. Hair in cornrows or coils. Before entering the cage: she closes her eyes. Sees lights. Sees God. One of the gloved figures holds her head with both hands, spreading Vaseline over the eyes thickened with keloid. She is told to smile and tries, but the bite-guard turns her cannibal. She raises her arms and the figure grazes her torso, hips, legs. Checks teeth, then sets her free.
*
Before the spectacle even begins it lasts, on average, a little under a minute to announce a fighter’s name. Some of these fighters have three or four nicknames they’ve added to their identities that they respond to more than you’d see on any birth certificate. They swirl their fists and slam down. They scream into the crowd, keep their frowns down and shuffle. When the fighters are in the cage itself, they run circles and grind their fists together. All grimace and strut. They stare each other down and point—they both know what they want.
*
In my writing workshop, there is a moment when the writers come into the rooms they occupy.
I try not to look at anyone when I get in there, we sit in the same chairs and I keep my head down, waiting for a fight to break out. Sometimes it happens. When it does, I watch. People are manipulated in these situations. Sometimes a fight happens and it never feels right.
*
I have these fantasies of an unknown flag draped around my shoulders— loyalty for the oblique, repping for the pre-defeated, running toward this pacing mercenary who has every intent to kill me. Someone is screaming my name and it’s the voice of my mother, or a dead friend. Doesn’t matter—they’re all looking for me now. Someone takes off my shirt because I can’t with gloves on. All around me, dark figures congregate. Someone is rubbing my eyes and blowing gently. Someone kisses my forehead. There is music. Chanting and opalescence. Bets are being made. My sister is there—she’s hanging onto the cage, yelling our family name. I never see who I fight, but I’ve felt her pace. I’ve tapped gloves on that heat and walked away.
Whoever she is, she’s just like me.
*
What exists for women who need to fight? What is the feeling we aren’t permitted to feel? How do we know the violence of our own arms? I was taught that I couldn’t express rage, so I raged against myself. I am a nightmare to her. The things I say, what I put her through, is terrorizing. And I don’t think men experience this to the extreme that the female psyche processes her furor. Women can be angry she-beasts while singing lullabies. Patriarchy says otherwise. When we do express violence, it’s covered. We’re put in glass vessels, made to smile and keep it down. It’s not real. We see containers and we get cages.
*
When I’m not under the weight of my own hand, it’s usually that of an unknown man. There were never any channels for me to express my anger, so it was labeled as something other than what it really was—neglect, for one, which it was. Neglect for offering no other way in which to absorb the shock and blow of waves of wrath I didn’t understand. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at an early age. Gastlit by a series of male professionals, pills were pushed at me and I took various antidepressants numbing my mind and tongue. But I was still mad. I was furiously sad. My anger was labeled as grief. There was sadness too believe me, I could suffer. I went off all my meds because I stopped feeling. What my mother and sister were able to normalize, I couldn’t bear. I preferred to live under a misdiagnosis than exist unfeeling and questionless. What I needed was someone to say be angry, kick and scream instead of being held down, choked like a contained martyr of reproach.
*
I’ll be one to admit I think Holly Holm was an underestimated fighter in UFC 193. After Holm’s win, Rousey made a statement that she couldn’t eat apples for six months and headlines tagged “apple-free” next to her name, as though she wasn’t as healthy, as strong. Additionally, the headlines in the MMA world immediately deemed Rousey “sad” after losing to Holm. A title on the MMA website literally read, “‘Sad’ Ronda Rousey reveals mouth injury”, as though the beat-down she received wasn’t proof enough. I have a hard time labeling Ronda term “sad,” even though Rousey herself made the original statement with the slur, ‘f****** sad’. This is a label with which I’m familiar. To all women who’ve been clipped with such needless, derogatory language in order to make sense of a setback: I need you to start fighting again. Stay mad.
*
When I started watching UFC fights, I was captivated by the ferocity. When I started watching the female fights especially, I fell through various degrees of longing for brute connections.
I longed to be hugged in blood. I wanted to understand another woman’s pain and share in the hard work of what it means to fight for your life, and survive. I wanted her to win, but I also wanted to win. I’m still falling through that brawl, still lashing out.
*
To end another heartlessly violent year in America, on and off stages, in cages and in the streets, Ronda returned after a year hiatus, this time, facing bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes, and she lost—again. She lost hard. It happened so fast, ended too soon. Rousey’s mother made a statement in the wake of the UFC 207 result, defending her daughter outside of the narrow viewership she receives within the franchise. Deservedly, she reminds us of Rhonda’s accomplishments prior to turning thirty, some of which include being the first American woman in a decade to win a world cup in judo, Olympic Bronze Medalist, first UFC world champion, first woman to make a million dollars in martial arts, co-authored sports book of the year—not to mention acting in three movies. Outside of two fights that rocked Rousey’s reputation, these accomplishments remain extremely difficult and competitive undertakings that most of the time aren’t recognized after two brutal knockouts in a row. Rousey is an undisputed female champion, having defended her title six times. Due to the incredibility of UFC 207, it’s hard not to focus on loss, but the perceived doom of a woman’s drive is a common misconception for all female fighters. Nunes, Holm, Rousey—and many others—all have drop-lists of international credit ever before entering UFC cages. They’ve been defending themselves for years. Beyond the confines of cages and rings, that fight doesn’t stop.
Why then, do Rousey’s losses seem to strip her of more than her belt and title? I understand the clear flaws within the UFC franchise. For every fight, there are other women in bikinis holding up the time cards. I get it. They’re hard-working, trained athletes. Some of them are former fighters themselves. Yet the seven seconds of screen time they receive distracts the integrity of what it means for women to fight in the first place. Yes, it sells a fight and it pays. Yes, it’s still a problem. UFC has a long way to go in terms of its progression into female allies and away from their ownership. But it is one of the few venues that celebrates and displays female violence. This is what we need to work with. It exists, it’s a start. I’m still watching.
*
They call me Boon. I have a raccoon hat in my closet, a gift from aching friends on a night when the stars were so pronounced they blanched. Big moon. My nicknames are typically easy rhymes—Nana, Banana, Anna Bee. But this version of myself answers to my natural state—Boon. Maybe my friends see through me to more violent abilities. But I know who I am, I keep brass knuckles on my dresser. Punching bag is in the garage, swinging.
Anna Leigh Knowles studies poetry at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, The Missouri Review online, Indiana Review (finalist for the 2016 Poetry Prize), storySouth and Thrush Poetry Journal. Currently, she is an assistant editor for the literary journals Crab Orchard Review and Quiddity.