Untitled ("We knew things before men did")

By Jack Joseph Smith

We knew diaster Downwhere violence is like chalk on an old black board Rape and murder is a way of life and so is organic foood The goverment draws our guys out And it is true, they want to do it anywhere they look I would not sleep with a man or a women No one shares my bed through that dooor It winds me up saying sush to the kids, but I got a disk, of "The Outlaw Josie Weles"

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A bitter declaration of female knowledge and Appalachian violence, mixing domestic refusal with political and bodily threat.

Claude

The claim is historical and gendered: women knew things before men did. The poem asserts a priority of female knowledge — domestic, bodily, intuitive — and the Appalachian violence that follows is what happens when that priority is overruled.

The declarative force sets up a counter-history in which women's knowledge is not supplementary but foundational.