Ginger Ayla | Bildungsro-misogyny | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Ginger Ayla (she/her) is a writer and poet who lives on the Colorado-New Mexico border with her partner and their beloved troublemakers, Winnie, Olive, and Bug. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM International, Phoebe, Grist, The Boiler, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Best New Poets Anthology. Currently a freelance writer and editor, she’s fueled by coffee, nature, and reality TV.

Ginger Ayla's Website

Also by Ginger Ayla: Self-Portrait as Burn Out The Great Minnesota Get-Together Drink, Anyway, the Light

August 20, 2025

Ginger Ayla

Bildungsro-misogyny

Everyone’s already started gulping fruit punch mixed with Fleischmann's by the time Mom introduces us around. She doesn’t know most of them and soon leaves to the local dive with a group of aunts and cousins while I watch a girl, older than me, thrown into the inflatable kiddie pool, I am adrift in a sea of faces I can't place anywhere but the mirror, breathless as the time an older boy put his hands around my neck at Parks and Rec and lifted me into the air, holding me there. The cool painted brick against my back. The florescent shock of coming up off my feet. My second cousin Crystal, the one I know, asks if I smoke weed. She says she hates the country air, eyes skittering for a place to land, but exclaims my hips — makes me stand out when I want to stand like an extra in the background of adolescence, omitting presence. A boy in the distance tells his friends You should always date fat girls cuz you can cheat on ‘em and they won’t do nothin’. Crystal says everyone here has a step dad, or a dead dad. I go to the gas station with Crystal and her boyfriend Jay. He keeps looking at me saying she's so innocent, such a good girl and in my head I count the ways I am not good, anxiety a three-headed dog eating its fill, door off its sill. I wonder if Jay has been robbed; pieces of his sedan are missing inside and out. At the gas station Crystal and Jay buy beer and snacks and Swishers and cigarettes. In the morning, scrawny shaved-headed boys with rat tails crouch in the barn, stare me down when I walk past to get a donut. I give them a chirpy hello like I'm flashing a firearm. Later some uncle won’t let me shoot the spud gun. It’s not for girls.

Using the idea of a “bildungsroman” to frame these experiences as education in misogyny felt especially resonant to me, and I love wordplay—even when my poems broach sensitive or heavy subjects. I experimented with putting this poem into a few different forms, but as soon as I tried it as a haibun, I knew it was the one. With its juxtaposition of prose and haiku, the haibun spoke naturally to the zoom-in, zoom-out reflex of childhood and the process of making sense of the world as we grow up.