Most Beautiful Woman In the World From One of the Saddest Places Breaks the High Jump Record 

By Elizabeth Cohen

Photo by Eugene on Unsplash

You could beat a

woman's country

down You could bomb a woman's

city You could

drown a woman's

home in shrapnel

You could kill the

children from a woman's street

You could force a woman to flee her

home You could

make a woman

leave her family

drive three hours

in a rainstorm of

shells to cross the

border into another country

thinking she may never come home

and see her

parents and grandfather again

You could send a missile that bursts

a dam that

releases tons of

oil into the river that

passes through a woman's city You

could kill all the

animals in the zoo

a woman visited

as a child You

could commit ecocide, bombing

a dam killing plants and wildlife

of her region You

could do all this,

and still, on a

Sunday in Paris,

Yaroslava

Oleksiyivna

Mahuchikh might

bend down, re-tie

her yellow shoes

take several deep

breaths, shut her

eyes bolt a curve,

leap into the air,

arch her back,

and clear a bar

2.10 meters in the

air This is what I

want to say: you

can break a

woman's world

and she might

leap up from all

that is broken and

jump higher than

any woman has

ever jumped in

the history of the

world demonstrating, in

case you had any

doubt that the sheer power of a

woman cannot be

shut down That

woman might

break the air,

break the light

break the known

laws of physics

taking back a

small piece of her

world that has

been torn open in

gold wrap herself

in blue and yellow silk 

... and walk on