One in Three or Four

There are too many of us for you to believe you are either alone or responsible. No woman asks for this. Some are children. Some are boys. Every one of us should have been heard. This is for Anna, age 17, who was then beaten and left to die; for Nathan, who at 11 admired the basketball coach; for Rosaline, who sees in her baby the face of a rapist and who finds that face difficult to love; for sisters when soldiers came, mothers imprisoned among guards, for aunties grandmas daughters sons, for one who was tied and one who tried to scream, one whose husband watched, one violated time after time, one torn apart, who called the police who did not call her back, who went to the clinic where there were no kits, who numbed her shame with drugs, who could not drink enough to forget, who took her life, who believed she was an object, who said nothing, who knew no one was there and that no one would ever be there. Know this: there are so many that if we could speak, our voices might spread like floodwaters over their boots and swell past security stations; that if we cried out together we might finally understand it as an assault on all people, all creation, and maybe then there would be justice in this war to claim yourself, a struggle mapped all over the flesh of every woman or child who has known what it is to be used, as you were, your sacred body.