CW: Rape, sexual assault
When I send my sexual abuse poems to Western magazines, they always end up rejected
My poems are orphans in blood-stained underwear waiting for an arm to reach inside the dark tunnel of some strange editor’s dank mailbox. Outside the post box, a sticker reads: “We are an ally of marginalized people and women’s rights. Send us your nightmares. Your rage. Your unspoken truths”. When the lid finally opens months later, they examine my unspoken, raging nightmares: a battery-operated phallus that scattered like mold from my five-year-old hymen to my consciousness. A family driver stretching my frozen seven-year-old legs like weightless twine at sea, miles from safe harbor. Drunken neighbors’ cabinet-heavy body pressing against my tiny drawer bones. A friend forcing his lips on mine “brother to sister”. Middle-aged polio leg guy pushing my seventeen-year-old tachycardic chest against the wall, muttering At last we’re alone and free. A man who told me Tu eres mi princesa, only to put my no in the shredder while I drift off to sleep.
Behold! Another icy form that reads: Sorry, this is not what we’re looking for. Romanticize your sexual assault. Make it pristine. Use only dreamy words like constellations, moon, light. Everyone swears they don’t fancy violence until they accept edgy but only for shock. Everyone wants poetry but only when it’s pretty. Everyone urges you to share your nightmares until they realize they can’t handle it. Everyone claims they are an ally until allyship is demanded. Every day a woman unzips her lips for liberty and justice for all for the first time. Every day, before her first syllable makes its way to the world, a White hand covers her mouth and tells her: Keep it as storybook-beautiful as possible.
For my niece struggling with bipolar disorder
There is a darkness in this world
that even the world can’t put a finger on.
Sometimes we’re asleep & it takes you
by surprise. The room shapeshifts
into a black ocean. You think god
I am so alone
on this boat. I am
drowning.
But know: even in our sleep,
we are out on the water.
Our limbs your paddles
into the dawn.
Sunlight hurts sometimes.
Let your salt brine this water. We don’t mind
if it turns into the Dead Sea. We will keep kicking
until we reach the shore.
Until your feet remember
home.
We will take out our tiny buckets
& scoop the flood out
of your marble eyes
until you see
you are goddamn worthy
of this boat.
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