Lydie Toure's poem begins in the dark. Some women lie awake at night, crying, haunted by nightmares and by a world that seems to punish them for "not being a man." Others manage to sleep, but they live through the same storms. The speaker's point is that the struggle of womanhood is shared, even when it looks different from one woman to the next.
The poem then turns from description to invitation. The speaker notes that some women fight alone, yet one woman's fight "should have been ours," and her own fights should belong to everyone. The line "I am a lot of us" shows her speaking for many voices, not just her own.
The mood moves from heavy and sleepless to hopeful. The broken, scattered layout of the lines mirrors exhaustion and unease, but the ending shifts toward solidarity: women are surviving alone now, but "soon" they will be "thriving as a whole."