content warnings: rape, sexual assault, murder, attempted murder, mental illness, pregnancy loss, kink/BDSM, consensual trauma play, chronic illness, disordered eating, body horror.
little deaths
this is how to take the man out of complicity:
killed backpacker – – – – – – – – – – – –
was into choking, bdsm ¹
(insert laugh track)
is fucking men at all
the darkest edge play
their conviction rate so low
that 99.5% of rapists still get off ²
last time i came
that many times
with any man
his bedside hatchet
dared my body
(tell me i enjoyed it)
& pleasure is pleasure is please
stop is please stop is please
the heart wants what wants blood
& this is how to tell a rape joke:
knock knock
who’s there
it’s you, splitting in two
dissociating into
headline / husk to fuck.
how many forced orgasmics
can’t screw with the lights on
(always see the hatchet
glint in lamplight)
hack hack
who’s there
a blunt blade by the bedside,
death threat / little deaths.
wrong blood staining his sheets
not my own but my expulsion
of the horror he conceived in me.
(insert dick joke)
look what she puts inside herself now
bedside silicone
dilators for the clench
leather for pleasure is for please stop
is for soft black cuffs to bind me
to my body when it splits
what happens after the scene
is as important as the scene itself ³
& let me kink myself to death
let me reclaim morality
i mean mortality
the body wants beating because
the heart wants to want beating.
survival is surfeit is surplus
is you should have died
if you knew what was best
(tell me i asked for it)
let none choose for me
when i choose to breathe.
you can’t consent to your own murder ⁴
but they’ll ask if it was good for you.
＿
¹ Headline from New York Post “reporting” the murder of Grace Millane.
² Statistic from RAINN: “Out of every 1000 sexual assaults, 995 perpetrators will walk free.”
³ Amber Dawn, “(K)ink: Writing While Deviant,” on consensual trauma play.
⁴ Comment by Brian Dickey, prosecutor in the case against Grace Millane’s killer, as quoted in a Vox article on victim-blaming in media reports about the case.
⚘⚘⚘
anaphylaxis
tell me I’m overreacting this body refuses
to breathe air with yours, to be co-formed
by matter we’d share
lungs clutch
guts clench
& count
the rates of gut disorders in the bodies of survivors of assault,
racial or sexual
the body rejecting a world
that will not let it live
what nutrition can a gut derive
from whiteness and abuse
we shit it out
before it touches us again
again again
that malnutrition thinned me so thin older men approved
& now
all fibres of my being inflame, refuse
assimilating proteins, begging,
put me out of being
imagine all the food you ate was trying to eat you back.
wake every morning in a knot of chronic pain
as every organ self-destructs
as every tendon twangs
to keep the body held together
as manhands grab still trying to claim
a tract of land a sickly morsel
this body is allergic to your world
and I am starving for connection
that will not assimilate my cells
my will
tattoo this spell in epi-pen across my seizing thigh
tell me I am overreacting
& try just try
to shove your matter down my throat
⚘⚘⚘
the horses are a metaphor for women i have broken
said the mentor in his poems, except
the poems admitted this in spite of him.
his horses came to us as nightmares,
heads bowed to conceal the shock
of our own faces which he painted
over theirs. like mirror images, rough
brow to brow, we stood and grieved
together for the fucked-up centaurs
we were forced to be, our bodies
trading memory by touch. after
the nightmares came the ships,
the nameless vessels he poured out
into his poems to stake unasked claim
over the body of the sea, conquistador
uncaring for his casualties. the ships
asked us to count the mingled bloods
that stained their masts—how many
bodies harpooned, left to wither
into sails—how many strands of hair,
our hair, were woven into sails to stop
the wind—how many names spilled
over the storm decks and erased. then,
from the water, we were undrowned
by the vultures. in a brace of bone
that once bore feathers, we set down
on land to hear them ask forgiveness:
fleshless birds that once in taxidermy
loomed above his bed and watched him
break us, now repenting how they tore
our meat to re-member their own. how
to begrudge the scavengers the flesh
that they were tossed, though it was ours.
they offer us their bones to build anew
prosthetic limbs, to join our old bones
into theirs into each other—we become
another form, a multitude, a gryphon
multiplied, a fractal rooted in the mud
where we were buried, bone stems
softening and blooming up like fungi,
a parasite asking consent to join the body
of each new host we encounter, joining
horse and tree and ship and creek,
survivors, every-gendered, joining bodies
joining limbs with every body human,
more than human, every body that
was ever used as poetry by rapists.
every body in us softens into weapon
for protection—we protect ourselves.
we know such illnesses and anger
in our new-shared blood. scar tissue
cushions every joint of vulture bone
and painted face, survivor skill
imprinted in each whorl of fur
or fingertip. we stand for nothing
but ourselves inside this poem.
