When I was fifteen, like all Catholic teenagers,

I had to choose a patron saint.

I racked my brain for a saint that quenched my thirst for purpose, one I might draw water from, but I found most divine figures unrelatable, or unsettling, or both. Then, in the cafeteria line at school one afternoon, I suddenly recalled that horribly humid August day in Bible School five years earlier. Back when we all still believed what we were saying. In this flashback, a single white box fan pollinated the room with particles of dirt and dust, and my teacher mentioned a saint in passing. Brigid. I didn’t know if she was a religious myth or a breathing person, and I forgot about her for years. Either way, rediscovering Saint Brigid turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Famous for her generosity and principled defiance, Saint Brigid bore the kind of courage I’d longed for, but always lacked. As I approached my confirmation date, I researched Brigid’s life, her unique legacy. According to early Irish texts, Brigid was born at sunrise — one foot inside the house and one foot outside. Neither fully sheltered nor fully exposed, she entered the world liminally, resisting categorization from her very first breath. Her birth in the doorway, to me, seemed a prophecy, as she straddled starkly different worlds throughout her life.

The daughter of a pagan chieftain and a kidnapped Christian woman, Brigid and her mother Brocca were enslaved by her father’s court. Saint Brigid had nobility in her blood, yet deep ancestral trauma and heavy oppression in her bones. She was born on the threshold between pagan and Christian traditions, between the ancient world and something newly forming.

From childhood, Brigid was known for her benevolence. To her father’s irritation, she gave to the less fortunate constantly: food, clothing, precious butter meant for supper. So, as men do with unbiddable women, her father tried to sell her. While her father bargained with another nobleman for her life, she took her father’s costly sword and gave it to a begging leper, encouraging him to trade it for sustenance. According to stories, her father was angry and went to strike her, but was kept from violence by Brigid’s potential buyer, a Christian man who actually admired the selfless act — though he noted that he wouldn’t marry a woman who might give away his things. At that point, Brigid’s father gave her permission to become a nun instead of marrying.

Throughout her years on Earth, she went on to become a vehement protector of countless people, many of whom were sick and starved. She cared for everyone from the orphaned children to the neglected cattle. She founded a powerful abbey at Kildare, negotiated with kings, and freed her mother from enslavement.

Inspired by her courage and persistence, I started praying to Brigid. Spread on the damp grass like an eagle in flight, I would close my eyes and listen for her. I could hear Brigid’s mammoth heart thumping through the Earth’s bosom, like she was buried alive and still breathing. I felt the ground shake every time I whispered her name.

At this same time, I was watching women in my parish be exiled for divorcing bloody fists. I felt sick watching those same fists be served first at the fish fry. I began to understand why Saint Brigid’s miracles are not ingrained into children like other saints. Brigid might make us want more for ourselves. It’s no accident when an extraordinary woman is erased.

Despite all her miracles and brave dissent, Saint Brigid has been sanitized by history. The woman whose determination petrified the men meant to rule her has been rebranded by the men meant to rule me. Brigid was not passive. She was no closed mouth and ironed skirt. Brigid reeked of radical empathy that not only irritated, but intimidated those in power. She refused to perpetuate cruelty for the sake of hierarchy. But I’ll stop telling you Brigid’s life story.

The point is, twelve years later, I started brainstorming my second poetry collection. I spent entire nights scouring my existence for a motif that felt nuanced and true, something that invited contradiction. As the work took shape, religious themes surfaced immediately, uninvited but insistent. I grew nostalgic for my church years, aching to speak in the language of ritual. Sometimes I miss when I thought a white ribbon on the front door could keep me safe.

One night this past March, I got on my creaky knees — quite the sacrifice for a sick girl. I prayed to my patron saint for the first time in over a decade. I asked her to help me write my truth because I know she’s good at being vulnerable. I begged her to show me the motif I was missing; I reminded her that my eyesight isn’t worth shit. There was no voice, no light, no sign. I heaved myself from the floor with a tired sigh.

That night, however, I dreamed I was wearing a high-necked dress shaped only of cockroaches — brown-banded ones, I think. In the vision, I was stumbling down the red carpet at the 2010 VMAs, strappy stilettos pinching my unpainted toes. Lady Gaga approached in her infamous meat dress. She gave me a full assessment, from my violet dyed strands to my sore feet, then leaned toward my pierced ear — I’m glad I’m not alone here.

It was after that dream that I realized Brigid, cockroaches, Lady Gaga’s meat dress… all of them were saying the same thing in different dialects: I am strange and good. Anyone could make a fool of me, or a foe of me. It doesn’t matter. I can survive. So, when people ask me what the roach means, I don’t say invincibility. I say it means that I’m plucky and lucky. I say it means that I bounce back. Prudence, Brigid, Roach — we have all survived within systems designed to decimate us. We are only undesirable because we’re impossible to kill. SAVED’s motif is simply my teenage patron saint reincarnated. Every page is a section of Saint Brigid scuttling up my church skirt. Sheltering beneath the dusty baseboards of my belly.

Laying eggs.

Pick up a copy of my book SAVED at prudencewrites.com. Signed copies come with a free sticker and a handwritten note. If you buy my debut TRUCE, same offer. I have several sticker designs but which sticker you get will be a surprise. Thank you for reading. Hope to see you soon. 😊🪳

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Below is one of my favorite passages from my debut poetry collection, TRUCE (Released in Jan 2025 ©). 

"You tell me I am a saint. I reply that’s sexist.
You chortle and say that’s why you love me.
(Because I hate the way you think.)"

find TRUCE here

In the passage above, I may come off a stony bitch — ungrateful and high-maintenance. “But Pru, he’s just being sweet! He loves you!” Yes, he loves me. But he is a man, and I am not a man. 

I am an angry woman.

When I first told him no name feels emptier than Angel, he struggled to understand my rationale. I told him men paint women as saints when they want to frame themselves as gods. They decorate their wives in diamonds when they want to feel like kings. For example, as I write this, there is a man snapping a low-quality photo of his supper plate for Daddy Zuck’s circle jerk, crafting a confidently misspelled caption about his devoted wife. Listing off everything he loves about her, like how she makes him feel. How she “takes care of everything.” I’ve been trying to count how many times I notice a man complimenting a woman for something unrelated to himself, conducting my own sort of Bechdel Test. The results are discouraging. Men — you have to understand — this pedestal only exists in public. There are wounds under that white fabric. Her wings are overworked. The consequence of painting your wife as a saint is denying her right to exist in more than one dimension. 

The reality is, women are stressed out and sick, only getting sicker.  My friend Ariel’s hair has begun falling out in clumps. She says God is pruning her, plucking the blonde from her body like viable eggs. She seems to be all root and rot these days. I know she is implying she is dying. It isn't only Ariel. Krysta blocked my phone number, but still emails me from an old work account so her husband won’t see. She’s started missing periods ever since they married. Researchers have spent years studying the relationship between suppression and chronic illness, and the pattern is not subtle. Women develop autoimmune disorders, chronic pain conditions, and other long-term illnesses at significantly higher rates than men. The maddening fact of the matter is:

Disability and depression are swallowing most women I know. 

Women are puking up supplements and packing lunches right after we wipe our mouths, acting like nothing happened. We’re hunched over hot stoves while our pelvises stretch us open, blood clots falling like fat red snowflakes into Diva Cups. We gasp in pain while our husbands play video games with their headphones on. 10,000 years of our matriarchs’ swallowed rage have left us damn near suffocated, dying from preventable diseases while doctors insist it’s our diet. Our weight. Maybe hormones. Have you tried birth control?! ( /s.) When anger has nowhere to go, it turns inward. It eats. This is not hysteria. It’s history. What kind of world could women build if we did not pour from empty cups? What kind of men would fall if we stopped propping them up?

In the Victorian era, male writers described the ideal woman as the Angel in the House, a phrase popularized by Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem of the same name. The angel was gentle, devoted, endlessly self-sacrificing — a creature whose highest calling was tending the domestic sphere and supporting her husband’s ambitions. She did not pursue glory of her own. Her virtue was measured by how quietly she served. More than a century later, Virginia Woolf wrote about this figure in her essay Professions for Women. Woolf said that before she could write honestly, she had to “kill the Angel in the House.” The angel, she explained, was the voice telling women to be agreeable, self-effacing, endlessly accommodating. 

Woolf understood that honesty is dangerous for women. To write truthfully is to risk being called ungrateful, hysterical, cruel. The angel survives by persuading us that silence is kindness. But if women are ever going to have agency  — if we are going to heal ourselves — we will have to do what Woolf did. We will have to make room for women’s voices in their full register: the tenderness, the laughter, the fury. We will have to pry the halo loose. 

Women who work for better worlds are rarely called angels, so I say deny me the title. I have no desire to be a disciple. I choose serfdom over stiff corsets; I’d rather be gutsy than gracious. Rather be free than frail. Fallen angels are the most beautiful kind. To the women reading, let me leave you with the last passage of Woolf’s essay.

You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers – but not to-night. My time is up; and I must cease.

Read “Professions For Women” https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/professions-women

Share

Together, we will read Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” write in response, and share (if you’d like). I will also bring two original prompts, in case you need extra inspiration! Attendance is capped at 12 people to keep things intimate. Nine spots are filled so far.

This is a free event, however there is a suggested donation to the Oregon Women’s Foundation. OWF provides grants, fosters research and advocates for policy change in order to defend and protect girls and women across the state. Before OWF got into research, no comprehensive reports about the state of women and girls in Oregon existed. The link to their website is here.

“Won’t You Celebrate With Me” circle will take place on March 8th at 6 PM Pacific time. Register here! I can’t wait to celebrate with you. :)

XOXO - Pru 🖤🪳

"Up to 30 percent of teenage girls in some parts of the United States say they have intentionally injured themselves without aiming to commit suicide, researchers have found.

About one in four adolescent girls deliberately harmed herself in the previous year, often by cutting or burning, compared to about one in 10 boys."

source:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/health /self-harm-teenagers-cdc.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

"An estimated 99% of nude deepfakes feature girls and women, and 'nudifying' models often don't work on images of boys and men."

source:

https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/press -release/internet-matters-calls-for -government-to-take-urgent-action-as-new -report-estimates-half-a-million-uk-teenagers -have-encountered-ai-generated-nude-deepfakes

WHERE THE FLOWERS GROW 

anywhere you dare 
to pay attention

on my rain-streaked street
pink geraniums & blue thistle
are roused from slumber
by the sky’s steady drizzle
gently woken 
by a clouds’ quivering chin

isn’t it terribly special
how I’m brave enough to notice

it takes courage to revel 
in the blush of the firstborn tomato
nuzzling the neck of the mother vine

one must possess a lion's heart 
to worry whether the stray cat
had his shots, to ignore the robot
in your pocket, quit fiending 
for false dopamine.

it’s modern nobility
to appreciate
anything.

if you want to know where the flowers grow,
look beyond your SEO. 
dream bigger than your brand allows,
stop performing for an algorithm.

look at how alive you are.

HOW TO BE A BAD CATHOLIC 

It’s remarkable. How fear can sell out every seat in a room. How another crumpled buck is stuffed into the traveling basket every time the priest mentions hellfire. I think the thick incense is meant to give us a glimpse of brimstone. The woman to my left is dressed head to toe in ebony, as if we’re all attending one joint funeral. She throws a ten in the wicker, like she’s making a wish in the town fountain and hands the basket to me. I pass it to my right without contributing a penny. I have given enough. I've given way too much. 

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Scarlet lace bra 
partnered with sagging white Hanes — 
January is caught off guard. 

She dances for you anyway.

She shimmies
down 
your esophagus 
and swallows everything 
you’ve been gagging on.

You tell her about your divorce
and she doesn’t act bored,
even though every man today 
has expressed disdain for women 
while a woman listened patiently.

She doesn’t bring up Taco Bell 
or your dead whiskey dick.
She knows what you’re ashamed of 
and avoids it.
She will say she's glad to see you,
because she is 
glad 
to see you. After all, 
her fridge is dry of formula.
Her son needs new soccer cleats.
Don’t be fooled, 
this is only a transactional distraction. 

If you didn’t pay January, 
she wouldn’t touch you.

Maybe that would be best.

find more things pru on my website.
(Find Isabelle here.)