Fear for a child is very different to the adult and exactly the same the child inhabits another decade, in the past, another life before they knew they were who they become the child wets the bed because she misses her mother who is beautiful, ethereal, slender and absent the smell of her still lingers […]
Bruised But Not Broken, Whisper and the Roar, Indie Blu(e), and Blood Into Ink are joining forces to publish an anthology about the lived experience of sexual harassment and assault. We believe that it is more important than ever before that more voices speak out and reclaim their strength by owning their survival stories. All contributors, female and male, can submit up to three pieces of creative work- these can include; Poetry, Prose, Essay, Short Fiction, Prose, or original Artwork, but should be limited in length (under 1,000 words) considering that this is an anthology. You will be notified if your work is accepted. Please do not consider nonacceptance as any diminishment of your experience, but as with any publishing venture, we must try to fit the individual pieces together into a strong whole.
All submissions should be sent to bloodintoink2017@gmail.com by midnight, Monday, October 15, 2018.
Please re-blog and get the word out.
she wasn’t like them, so they didn’t like her
to her face they smiled and said ‘nice things’
which she knew were lies
behind her back they laughed
and made dirty-lezzie jokes
because it made them uncomfortable
to think about what they thought she did
it made them feel a bit disgusted
like when you stand too close
…
she looked like them in superficial ways
wore at times, nicer dresses and had longer hair
the fact that she liked girls wasn’t in their
comfort zone
when it was summer time they had
BBQ’s and invited all the neighborhood kids
wondering if she would be safe around minors or
would do something inappropriate
when they started a mommy running club
she wasn’t invited because she was neither
a mommy or someone they wanted to
bare their secrets with
what would she understand of husbands?
maybe their husbands liked her
because she was unavailable
when it was Halloween they made candy and
knocked on all the doors but hers
because the other mothers said best to avoid
what they did not care to know
…
that’s why she lived a harder life than she had to
for there is almost nothing worse than pretend friendliness
leaving you more alone than if they said what they thought
and spat in your face
if you think that’s an exaggeration or she feels
sorry for herself
think on the tiny percent of the world
where being gay is safe or legal
and the huge part of the world where it is forbidden or punished
think on how many lament at
the shift in culture toward acceptance
calling it a ruination of our society with all
those damn fags
compare it to those who truly feel inclusive
how every day isn’t the same
when you have to contend with not fitting in
making everyone else feel uncomfortable
just by existing
nor can you talk about what matters to you
just in-case visual images abound and people
begin to change the subject
…
if it were a choice … a lifestyle … few would make it
yet she exists
wishing sometimes the phone would ring
another girl like her would say
I know how you feel
would you like to go for a walk?
she is a gay princess in a tower
and her princess
is somewhere in the world perhaps
thinking the same thoughts
two outsiders
unable to find each other
Before
Who knew how to die?
That it wouldn’t be instantaneous
As children imagine
A sudden pain, then unconsciousness
Who knew?
Death could go on years
Building and slowing like cold sea water
Burning firework left to fizzle alone in inky sky
That it would wind and unwind, a mad clock void of correct motion
Who knew?
It could take the very young, wrap them in wool, to cast down wet hill
The jarring and bumping eventual colission held at bay
Till forgotten
That it could take you
Suspend you from me and all familiar things
Where the recognition in your once clear and beautiful eyes
Became muddied and clouded with quiet violence
Your touch so soft, stolen and replaced with flinty brush off
Who knew
The courage of fighters
Seathing against their sentence and eventual
Chop chop of parts, scars and marred
Skin once free of blade
A scratch board of operation knives
She reached me
As I sat in my safe world
Pulled me through
I smelt anticeptic
Read her clever whirring mind
Far too smart for this dull world
How can such people die?
She laughs and says
At least I’ll go young and whilst I have my looks
So long as you don’t show the undertaker my scars
They remind me of barbed wire and grey hair and the lines you cut in snow
When skiing downhill
Her lips are red, she says
I used to ride horses and can speak five languages
I say
I wish you would stay
I could read you eternally
It’s the macabre and giggling nervousness you feel
Around dying
It brings out the worst or the best of us
I wanted to bolt
Race down the road
But I remain and listen
To the gurgle of her catheter
And saw the bruised clouds grow
As rain came like tears behind pitched fingers
Her humor never left
She knew more than all of us
What a terrible, terrible waste
She said; I can make an authentic French 75
I wanted to swap places, I am not so rarefied
But I am a coward
Before the machinations of surgeons
What devour they do, to our poor skin
Does it really prevent anything?
She asked, laughing at the cat
Who is also old and infirm before his time
Still batting the window when birds come to peck
At crumbs of comfort because it’s those little things
She says, keep you going
Like my favorite soup, a funny film, the sun coming over horizon
Reminding me I can still
Breathe
I learn to appreciate life
From her dying
The morsel of me
Though of language I only know two and
Cannot spell in either
It seems
Life is savage in her cull
The bright and wonderful snatched
Who among us had an idea of
How to die?
Then she laughs
Her teeth still white, her skin waxy and hot
And says, oh dear you!
Who among us
Knew truly
How
To live?
If I hung in a storefront
I’d have no label
It was torn off in the wash
The store owner lied
Trying to cover a great crime
I’m not gentle cycle, nor wash below 30c
I don’t fluff up well in dryer
Or need ironing on low heat
I’m a thrift store special
Good for a gander, then better cast off
Stuffed in the back of your closet
Forgotten until you move house
When you hold me to the light
Exclaiming; where did I buy this?
A little wistful, a little disgust
Just like a spare thread can run
Through any knit and mar its form
I was shrunk on hot and stretched in cold
Long before you grabbed me out of the lucky dip bin
It was the elongation of my experience
Like wool is malformed turning huge in water
Expanding and reducing, I am the sheared sheep who took off
When the shepherd came to my turn
I never backed down, nor avoided spitting in their eye
My fur smells of energy and emptiness and freedom and neglect
You wear me when you want attention
Or to be someone you’re not
And I’m sequins gathered in a pearls bosom
The knotted mohair and impossibly soft angora
But most of all, I’m the time you left your possessions behind
And rode in the dark without lights
Imagining your bicycle a horse and you …
with your dress catching in the spokes covered in oil
You just wanted him to catch fire on your edges
Sounding the cavorting need you had to bloom beneath
Then you were a water-lily and even years later
You are reminded each time a candle is lit, the smell of wax
How he burned your fingers with his inelegant desire
And you opened like origami to his bewitchment
Then you were a dragonfly, passing through fountain
If I hung in a storefront
I’d have no label
But you’d purchase me all the same
Over again
Smiling
At the memory of
Something you couldn’t quite grasp
It took one finger to break into her
one finger to make her feel violated and dirty
two to make her scream
the boys laughed afterward mockingly
why you so upset girl? we didn’t deflower you
you should thank us bitch
or maybe we should just do what we came here to do
they pinned her down, her tights stretched between her legs
like her fractured hymen
she saw the beginning of tears and inside felt
the raw and hurt center cry out
don’t come back don’t ever come back
they were only eleven years old
lying on the floor in the outside toilets
staring at the stars hardly there because of all the smog
her lungs filled with hurt
they were her friends
until they became rabid dogs
she didn’t know what switched the switch or why
they felt she was there to poke and prod
they were too small and she was too small and everything about it
was premature
which meant
waiting until it happened again
she wasn’t a victim but some things reoccur
as if on some awful cycle
sometimes she’d shudder thinking about
their little hard cocks
trying to pry their way in
the way it felt to be hurt like that
with unwashed fingers scrabbling and opening
the parts of her nobody should
she could visualize the cement beneath her
the smell of urinals and their unwashed genitals
if they had known enough to put them in her mouth
they would have
thankful for small mercies she knew
kids these days wouldn’t be so innocent
they see porn before they know how to spell
pornography
what ideas they must get and how
many bad things go on behind closed doors
or even ones held shut by little boys
seeking to immitate older brothers
she would have impaled them with
her rage if she wasn’t so ashamed
so she said absolutely nothing to anyone
least of all the teachers who would have
called her a slut who asked for it
even at eleven years old.
***
When she reached fourteen
the Golem returned
held her down, muffled her mouth
stuck it in like a needle threading through skin
her scream pierced every limb
and nobody heard
nobody wondered why
she wasn’t home for dinner
her plate was left in the fridge
she was emptied of the last piece
of her soul
left gasping where her privacy had been
legs spread and men hustling in
one after the other took their turn
after all wasn’t it a party? Make it count!
her face closed off and remote like she was dead
some of them were small and bony
their penises hardly large enough to feel
between the soreness and the swelling
others bore into her like a metalic truck
thrusting her back onto her thin tail bone
hands around her neck
fingers pinching her nipples and breasts
they filled her with a disgusting smell
she was never going to be whole again
or clean
and when it was over, it had just begun
face after face, cock after cock
a tape on repeat of her worst nightmare
they came, they came and they went
the only evidence there staining the bed
and her rubbery legs unable to flee
tied and sodomized like a string of beads
she flew out of her crumpled body
a bird of wing and feather only
she saw someone she almost recognized
torn and ribboned and splayed
a garish doll, a parody, a destroyed shape
someone she was no longer
as she lifted, higher and higher, beyond that point
no pain anymore just the thick blush of shame
hidden in plumage
she felt nothing but
a choking word on her tongue
WRONG
WRONG
WRONG
her child’s form
her hardly grown self
the silence of nothing
then it did not matter
what time she wasn’t coming home
all the world was quiet now
movement had stilled
the door was shut
nobody knocked
nobody unbuttoned their pants
and sank to their knees
lifting her up for one more final
free fuck
as if she were no more than a hole
not a human
not a worthy soul
immitation the greatest form of flattery
is not
she was cold now to the touch
her spirit somewhere in the stars
it took one finger to break into her
and a record set on repeat playing
over and over until it scratched
and could not play
anymore
the song of rape.
For all the survivors whose voices are quashed.
She is nude
Dearticulate
Her nipples graze the passage of her downfall
Blood is dry and hennaed between her thighs
Who stand witness
To aborted possibility cut short
Held glistening above her in crucifixed parody
She will never bear life
It is not her weft and the thick choker around her neck
Tightens as reminder
If she grows swollen it will be from loss not gain
No feeling of a child pushing its way out
Only the deadening cold taste of metal on her skin
A doctor’s “tut, tut” and rough handling, his voice a graze
Staining her inevitable socially affixed shame
She stares out of a small window
Paint pealing like tears on the empty sill
Where a bird sits sheltering from rain
She thinks of him cutting his way into her with flint eyes
Hands around her throat, pulling her apart
A flashlight douses darkness, shining on blood and her hand
Reaching out
She is empty now
Passion snuffed, an ember no longer close to surface
She is an arroyo dried and crusted over
She is a gourd grown without seed
Disappointment is her meal, she is a featherless bird on wire
Dried empty by sun and rinsed of music
Before this, her watermelon body swayed in water-sprinklers
Feasting on her abundance and possibility
All that would be, all that would be
Is laid waste
Tumbleweed and Joshua tree
Punishment and consequence
The rapist will return at night to his wife and
Three blonde children
She will recover from her tears and cuts
Even the shame of feeling his soil enveloping her
But she will never
Never
Forget what he took in miscarried act
What would happen if we swapped vision?
The fridgidity of growth or a certain constraint
Because if you split my casing I would possess less chance
My surround would envelop your shadows and night cross twice
For women have a shorter life and a longer one
Small boned with narrow shoulders and deep set eyes
Stretching barren like a long road through desert
If she could turn the knife around
Press it gently against his steady pulse
Cut out the evil as he removed her chance
To fill her arms
With life
The teacher hadn’t enjoyed teaching in a long while
ever since her notions and reality rubbed against one another
exploding the myth she held in teaching college, of making a difference
her students
whom the administrators asked her to refer to as clients
wanted to pay for a degree, not to learn
we don’t have time to study they lamented
we are too busy with everything else which is, so much more important
the students
did not respect her because she earned less than
they believed they would earn in a few years time
she wanted to say DREAM ON but it was no longer acceptable
to tell the truth
especially with college administrators
(who were paid well, to shuffle papers from desk to desk)
watching in the wings
she recalled why
she had wanted to be a teacher
at eight she’d been sent to a foster home
where the ‘father’ decided to show and tell
using his fingers in wrong positions
she ran away and lived
underneath a bridge for the night
listening to the stars wink on and off
and the weave and fall of the world
the next day they found her, dirty and lost
spanked her for making up lies about being abused
and sent her to another foster home
this time the mother
starved her lean
told her she was fat and ugly
when she hardly weighed in
got her to clean and cook and scrub
she preferred that kind of reality
it didn’t involve lies it was honest in its
taste of cruel
when summer was over and she returned to school
a new teacher had begun work
she had the faraway eyes of a dreamer
and her voice was soft like bird song
without saying a word she knew the children who
had been neglected and abused
she’d encourage them often and whisper in their ears
this may seem like this is all there is
but there’s so much more!
one day you will be free to escape your confines
you can shrug off your sadness and become
anything you want
so when the time came for her to age out of the system
she didn’t bring flowers and a card for her foster-mother
instead she packed her single bag and left before
morning showed in the sky
the room was bare and emptied but somehow
it didn’t look so different to when she’d lain there
trying to take up the smallest space
funny that we can inhabit a place for so many years and
when we leave it’s like we were never there
a wraith who didn’t get heard or couldn’t
break out of her little mincing trap of potted meat
she hated the flabby jowls and empty eyes
of those who pretended to keep
her safe
being old enough now to look after herself she
enrolled in teaching college hoping one day
she could reach a child who sat at the back of class
with dirty socks and a mouth full of regret
but time moves on and things change even as they stay the same
kids become hardened, demanding, insolent
hurry up, please it’s time!
parents throw expectations like rocks and call educators
pathetic losers who can’t do, so they teach
she wondered
is cruelty a vein, like in a rock
inherited over time to savage and destabilize
our yearning for safety?
standing there, in her cheap hose and one good pair of shoes
the scuff blacked out by polishing
she saw in the sassing faces of her classroom
a loss of care for changing the world
her own longing to reach through time and alter
one person’s trajectory lost
in the hustle bustle of uncaring formula
spitting out diplomas and marching forward
not thinking at all
about what they have to learn
Written for World Teacher Day. In appreciation of teachers.
It was raining the day the movers truck pulled up
piling furniture into the back, exposed to wet streets
everything dirty and unfamiliar
when you take your safety out of its box
when you unlatch your secrets
and expose the insides of a locket
sticky mouths seek to further that exposure
until nothing of your peace remains
but the belly of your secrets on display
as if you were sitting in class without underwear
as if the abuse etched in your soul were a t-shirt
as if his fingers weren’t in the dark but had been
dipped in luminescent paint and everywhere they went
left their grimy imprint / yet you think
this horror may have been the very best thing
as wretched as exposure may taste
at least it wouldn’t be a case of disbelief
how many women does it take?
for one person to not hesitate
how many must say;
he did this / that happened / we are not okay
because of this / why do I have to prove / with gore
and soiled soul / the truth / why isn’t it sufficient that I say
why why why
did he lay a hand on me?
how many women does it take?
a juror in the Bill Cosby case disclosed the reason for his guilty verdict;
I believed he was guilty because he said he had drugged girls
hearing it from the horses mouth got my vote
are we bidding on a horse? Did you check the inside of his mouth?
what of the SIXTY women who spoke?
their voices do not warrant proof?
were people just speaking words?
to deaf sign posts stating;
move on / get over it / don’t make a fuss / why should we believe you?
one person has lied before / you must be lying / that’s our automatic default
what hope then
for one girl?
one single soul
violated in the dark
of a house when all is moved out
and she is left inside a shell, within a shell
the echoes of trucks taking memories
somewhere else
how many women does it take?
to be heard.
Her mouth
Had a tremor
Just beneath the surface
It spoke
Of the repression of horror
If she let it out
That creature would
Climb to the highest point
And start screaming, needful not of words.
She wrapped her arms around her chest
Feeling the absence of one breast
Her mom used to say
You forgot to grow into a woman, flat chested sparrow chick
Her boyfriend liked her angularity
It’s not very Latino, her sister decried
Shaking her own ample swelling bossom
She favored simple necklines and no bra, catching soft balls with callused hand
Then why she wondered
Did my breast betray me?
I never demanded anything of her
My children did not
Tug with hungry mouths on her unduly
Nor a lover, bite unkindly deep
She felt the tight, smooth scar
Like a flat knife lain on her chest, like unwanted medal
It seemed to hotly whisper
The curling, metal irony of us all
Without sufficient power to stave
Fate’s random cruelty
(For all women)
