Finding my courage to speak up twenty-five years after I was raped, writing Speak, and talking with countless survivors of sexual violence made me who I am today.
This book shows how that happened.
It’s filled with the accidents, serendipities, bloodlines, tidal waves, sunrises, disasters, passport stamps, criminals, cafeterias, nightmares, fever dreams, readers, portents, and whispers that have shaped me so far.
My father wrote poetry, too. He gave me these guidelines: we must be gentle with the living, but the dead own their truth and are fearless. So I’ve written honestly about the challenges my parents faced and how their struggles affected me. The poems that reference people other than me or my family are truth told slant; I’ve muddled specific details to protect the identities of survivors.
This is the story of a girl who lost her voice and wrote herself a new one.
this book smells like me
woodsmoke
salt
honey and strawberries
sunscreen, libraries
failures and sweat
green nights in the mountains
cold dawns by the sea
this book reeks
of my fear
of depression’s black dogs howling
and the ancient shames riding
my back, their claws
buried deep
this book is yesterday’s mud
dried on the dance floor
the step patterns
cautiously submitted
for your curious investigation
of what I feel like
on the inside
one
When he was eighteen years old, my father
saw his buddy’s head sliced into two pieces,
sawn just above the eyebrows by an exploding
brake drum, when he was in the middle
of telling a joke.
Repairing planes, P-51s, on an air base in England,
hungry for a gun, not a wrench, my father
pushed an army-issue trunk into his mind
and put the picture of his friend’s last breath
at the bottom of it.
Then they sent him to Dachau.
Not just him, of course, his whole unit,
and not just to Dachau, but to all of the camps
because the War was over.
But not really.
Daddy didn’t talk to me for forty years
about what he saw, heard, what he smelled
what he did about it;
one year of silence for every day of the Flood,
one year for every day from Lent until Easter.
The air in Dachau was clouded with the ash
from countless bodies, as he breathed it in
the agony of the dying infected my father,
and all of his friends. They tried to help
the suffering, followed orders, took out their
rage in criminal ways while their officers
turned away. My father filled the trunk
in his head with walking corpses who sang
to him every night for the rest of his life.
One day Daddy watched a pregnant woman
walking slowly down the road
near the gates of Dachau
he matched his steps to hers,
then stopped as she crouched in a ditch
and birthed a baby.
My father, a kid on the verge of destruction,
half-mad from the violence he’d seen
desperate to kill, to slaughter, to maim,
watched that baby slip into the world
between her momma’s blood-slicked thighs
and it healed him just enough
that he wept.
He wrapped the newborn in her mother’s apron
and helped them both to the Red Cross tent
set up for survivors.
Veteran of D/depression,
the German war and atrocities
a handsome boy married the tall girl
who looked like Katharine Hepburn
two kids adrift in a city far from home
two ships ripped from their moorings.
Mom told me the story when I was in high school,
on a night when Daddy’s drinking
drove our family to the edge
“He had to slap me,” she said. “It happened
before you were born.”
The image of my father hitting
my mother picassoed in front of me
like Sunday sunshine slicing
through the church windows, fracturing
and rearranging the truth on the floor.
They lived in Boston back then
Daddy studying to be a preacher
Mom trying to be a wife.
“He had to slap me,” she repeated.
“I was screaming,”
screaming for reasons
too many to count.
The full story came out in gingerbread
crumbs dropped to show me the way.
After the meltdown, the attack,
they had to ride the train home
to repair the damage to her face
home to the mountains, to their parents
to a clucking village of spite,
her broken teeth vibrating
in bloody sockets,
her husband horrified at the war
he’d declared on his beloved,
he turned toward the aisle
thinking of escape.
Her backbone crumbling
under the weight of her heart,
she fixed her eyes on the dark
forest just beyond the glass.
“I wouldn’t shut up,”
she said. “He had to.”
The lie told to friends was that she fell,
clumsy, tumbled down the stairs
so many broken teeth, poor thing
bad things happen
in big cities, you know.
The truth was that the stress
of fighting the ghosts in his head
broke him that night
and as they argued
my father didn’t just slap my mother.
He beat her.
But beatings didn’t fit in the fairy tales
she liked to tell herself
so she sugarcoated the story
to make it easier to swallow.
The town dentist, a family friend,
didn’t charge for his labor
gently apologized with every tooth.
They lived with her parents all summer
while her mouth healed,
waiting for the false teeth, they tiptoed
but they did not touch.
After the stitches came out
after she learned to mix
tooth powder with water
to make the glue
that held her mouth together,
after five miscarriages,
five never-born sons,
my parents tried again
and created me. He didn’t ever hit
her again, but she lived in the fear
that he would, which had everything to do
with her habits of silence.
I said “shit”
in front of the church ladies
gathered in our kitchen
for coffee and doughnuts,
three-year-old me:
the potato-shaped, sturdy-legged
parrot-tongued echo chamber
I fell down, scraped my knee,
and said “shit” in frustration,
the word I had learned
from my mother
crammed and dammed
into the corseted life
of a minister’s wife
where she couldn’t say
“shit”
if she had a mouthful.
But alone,
with me,
she could, and did
frequently.
That day in the kitchen,
as the church ladies
eyed my mother’s handmade
curtains, measuring her skills,
I baby-cursed and was snatched from the floor.
Shoving a bar of soap into the mouth of a child
was then a common practice, church lady approved,
for scrubbing dirty words from the minds
of the young, the violence
of generational silence
brutally handed down.
Ivory grooves deep-carved
in the bar by my baby teeth
Mommy’s bruising fingers
pinning me against the sink
My sobs captured in bubbles
heard only after they popped,
after I was jailed in my room
and the ladies of the church and my mother
sipped bitterness and shared crumbs.
I learned then that words
had such power
some must never be spoken
and was thus robbed of both
tongue and the truth.
My mother took me to a pond
when I was four years old
for swimming lessons. There was a beach,
of sorts, littered with pine needles and mothers
smoking cigarettes on towels,
wearing sweaters and warm socks;
summer in the North Country.
Mom tugged off my sweatshirt and shooed me
toward the crowd of kids standing
at water’s edge. The Lady of the Lake,
our swimming teacher, a giantess topped
with a rubber bathing cap studded
with plastic flowers,
began the lesson.
On our bellies, facing the beach,
hands in the mud
legs in the water, my feet motorboated obediently.
I didn’t mind kicking long as I could hold
on to the shore.
But then the Lady beckoned us into deep water
one by one. I refused,
even with the rest of the class staring.
The Lady hooked me under the armpits and pulled
me in.
Never trust anyone with plastic flowers
on their head.
I hollered so loud the Lady consulted
with my mother,
the other moms clucking and whispering.
I won
the position at the shallowest edge of the pond
where I pulled through a few inches of water
with my hands in the earth,
occasionally waving an arm in the air to pretend
like I was swimming,
a stubborn tadpole
suspicious of the deep.
In first grade we moved
country mouse to the city
whiskers quivering, eyes wide,
couple days later Mom put my sister
in the stroller and we three
walked through a drizzle of gold
and ruby leaves up one hill, down
another to the new school, made of bricks,
registered in the office, Mom handed me
my lunch box and waved
a fast goodbye
I sat in the back row, played
hopscotch with some girls, and ran
hands in the air as the bell rang at day’s end
followed the crowd out the door,
the crossing guard our white-gloved guardian,
I walked down the block
in the wrong direction
Stopped.
Back to the intersection, ninety-degree turn
went up the hill, that felt better
until it didn’t
until the houses were the wrong shape to hold
my family.
Stopped.
Back to the intersection, worried, then down the
third street, the wrong third way.
Stopped. Back to the intersection
the fourth spoke of the wheel another mistake.
Last kid in sight, country mouse,
five years old, spinning
at the center of a compass that had lost
her true north
A white glove waved, the guard crouched
wings tucked neatly behind her back,
eyes all-seeing
she wiped my tears and took my hand
and led me
up the hill again, gold and ruby leaves,
farther than I’d dared on my own tiny paws,
until we crested and scurried
down the other side and the houses
changed shape and at the very bottom
of the hill stood my new home
my mother waiting at the curb.
Mr. Irving styled and helmeted my mom’s hair
introduced her to the other ladies, permed,
perfumed, fuming about their husbands
the confessor hairdresser, he knew all
the juicy details. Told Mom I should join
the city swim team, cuz all the kids did
and it would make me tired enough
to sleep better at night, and not spend
so much time in her hair.
There was a slight delay in joining the team
while I learned to swim in water deeper
than six inches. But then I traded muddy ponds
for cement swimming pools in schools
and parks all over the city, tadpoling
backstroking, butterflying, freestyling
until my body leaned, gleamed, hardened
into a core of speed
with a snaggletoothed grin.
Didn’t care much about winning,
but I hated to come in last, my sweet spot
was lane seven for long, slow miles of laps
punctuated by flip turns
boom!
powering underwater, mermaid made real
I felt my gills growing
I could breathe without air.
Underwater, city
swimming pool
a shiver of slippery boys
eleven, twelve years old
with shark-toothed fingers
and gap-toothed smiles
isolate
the openhearted girls
eight, nine years old
tossed in like bloody
buckets of chum.
The boys circle, then frenzy-feed
crotch-grabbing, chest-pinching,
hate-spitting
the water afroth
with glee and destruction.
Girls stay in the shallows
after their baptism as bait,
that first painful lesson
in how lifeguards
look the other way.
I hated reading. Loathed the ants
swarming across the page, lost
my excitement about school, fought, reduced
to a puzzle with missing pieces.
Once branded, the feeling of stupid never fades
no matter how many medals you win.
But then we rode the bus downtown
me and Leslie, who majored in music
and lived in our attic, Mary Poppins
with a Jersey accent, we rode the bus downtown,
the coins hot from my hand plink, plink
in the box next to the driver, all the way downtown
to a Carnegie library built by an immigrant
so everyone could read, free
and untrammeled by politicians seeking
to bind them into ignorance,
chain them to the wheel.
Leslie promised she’d read me the books
so I didn’t have to be afraid of mistakes
and I wrote My Name in big letters
got my first badge, a library card
I asked the librarian
“Can I take out all the books?”
and she answered quite seriously
“Of course, dear,
just not at the same time.”
And so, with extra Leslie help and a chorus
of angels disguised as teachers and librarians
for years unstinting with love and hours
of practice, those ants finally marched
in straight lines for me
shaped words, danced sentences,
constructed worlds
for a girl finally learning how to read
I unlocked the treasure chest
and swallowed the key.
Mrs. Sheedy-Shea
taught me haiku, I word-flew
off the page, amazed
indoctrinated by magazine covers of skeletal
white privilege like the Kennedys
(only peasants ate, apparently)
my parents, poor-clanned and striving
rose to the occasion and smothered
my hunger
by pinching my hips
grabbing the fat under my chin
when I was eight years
ten, fourteen
twenty-five hungry years old
when they grabbed and pinched
they called me “Baby Hippo”
the insult disguised as
love, they said others would tease
me for being so fat
so I might as well
get used to it
When we were girls we rode horses
disguised as bicycles
though anyone with eyes could see from the way
we leaned, preened their manes, galloped
across the plains without ever leaving
Dorset Avenue, their true equine nature
we were magic-filled girls at large
in a world of pedestrian dullness.
After riding hard, we’d walk to cool
down our steeds, feed them sugar cubes, pump
their tires, straighten the playing cards
in the spokes
that made the thwacka-thwacka-thwacka-thwack
announcing our arrival, knees always skinned,
crusted with scabs from tripping
over the buckled sidewalk that was heaved
into the air by killing frosts and held there
by the roots of long-dead trees,
left broken to teach children
lessons about watching our step.
I used my jump rope for reins and a lasso
for runaway calves, and the whirling dervish
of girl games, sky-jumping, earth-touching,
clap-backing
shouted with rhymes. We got tangled
up a lot and fell,
splitting open our half-healed knees, we licked
our bloody wounds clean
and started all over again.
My bike had a shelf on the back, an ornament,
I guess, but made of metal. One day,
I let a friend’s little sister ride on the back
of my horse
on that shelf, her shoelaces tangled
in the spokes, her leg twisted
at a horrible angle, then broke.
Her screams drove
me to the linen closet, where I hid for hours,
sobbing
burning with the horror
that I’d hurt her, not my fault, but yes,
totally my fault, and she wore a heavy cast for
months.
I stopped playing horses after that.
The taste of shame smells
like stubborn vomit in your hair
lingering no matter how often you wash it
sometimes you have to shave
yourself bald
and start again like a newly hatched chick
leaving the faint rot of broken magic
in shattered eggshell pieces
behind you.
After Charlotte’s Web
but before Little Women,
my sister stole the key
to my green plastic diary,
and blackmailed me
with what she found
We shared a room split in two
with masking tape laid down
the middle of the floor,
and the closet, the lines
never to be crossed
I hadn’t committed felonies
or misdemeanors, yet; I was in fifth grade
but still, she tattled about what I wrote
how I’d cheated in math
and planned to do it again
I repaid her treachery
by telling stories in the dark
while we waited for sleep,
said I was a vampire, the moles
on my neck proved it,
part werewolf, too, casting
stories by the light of the moon
until she cried for Mom
who yelled at me for scaring
my sister, and grounded
me so I never did it again
but I threatened to
whenever she crashed
through the border
Maybe I owe her,
my sister,
for stealing the key, toying
with my secrets, and thus igniting
the slow-fused inevitability
of me weaving stories
in the dark
1. Daddy loved Jesus, talked about Him so much when I was little I thought He was a cousin, maybe just a second cousin, which would explain why He was never at Grandma’s for Thanksgiving. Daddy was a preacher on a college campus, he worked in the chapel and I could walk there by myself to say hello if I looked both ways before I crossed the street.
2. My job was school, I was really good at recess and lunch, but I failed climbing the rope that hung from the sky in gym. I tried to be sick every Friday so I wouldn’t fail the spelling bee. The playground was a war of girls versus boys and now I feel shame cuz some kids must have wanted to stand with the other team, and some must have wanted new teams entirely, but the world was drawn for us binary in clumsy chalk lines, and we’d try to do better when we were in charge.
3. Protests against the Vietnam War echoed across the campus, our house filled with angry students every weekend, and my mom fed them vats of spaghetti and trays of brownies. Daddy worked all the time because students were getting so high they thought they could fly and they jumped out of dorm windows five stories up, which was awful, and the sadness and the rage and the protests and the soldiers and the yelling and the guns and the FBI tapping our phone and the corpses of Dachau made it hard for Daddy to sleep and he could smell the ashes again and my mom thought he was killing himself and he was, but he was doing it in slow motion.
4. I finally learned to read and they finally integrated our school and the new kids were really nice and long division was impossible and my mother cut my hair wicked short cuz swimming and everyone thought I was a boy which was NOT FUNNY because I wasn’t and I didn’t want to be one. Boys were gross.
5. Daddy was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and he forced us to listen to the Watergate hearings on the radio, he hated Richard Nixon with all of his heart and soul; when drunk, Daddy threatened to kill the son of a bitch because he was destroying the country. I watched the level of gin in the bottle and realized that counting the bottles was more important.
6. Spring of sixth grade, all of us crammed into the music room, sticky hot and stinky cuz we were almost seventh graders and the chairs were too small and our hormones were blowing UP. But we were children. Who smelled. It was a confusing time. Our music teacher, Mrs. Schermerhorn, dragged us through a rehearsal for the Spring Musical Performance That No One Wanted to Hear. We were terrible singers and horrible children, but
something happened
the planets lining up, gods playing cosmic checkers, a butterfly flapping in Bangladesh
she made us sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” yeah, that one, from Sound of Music, when Maria and her family stop in a convent as they are escaping the Nazis, a song about doing hard things, we sang that song without fooling and when we were finished Mrs. Schermerhorn coughed, cleared her throat, warned us not to move, and she ran out
(of course we moved and gossiped and complained and farted and rolled our eyes it was June and we only had a few days left).
7. This all went down right around the time my parents stopped worrying about things like school concerts and report cards. I thought I was the only kid with a house on fire, but I wasn’t.
8. Mrs. Schermerhorn returned with our principal, Miss Hartnett, and she told us to sing again. Nervous, too many yearlings in a small corral, we didn’t want to obey, but we had no choice, we sang
letting go
opening
and ninetyish voices, some cracking, some strained under weights unseen, murmurated, a flock of swooping starlings, harmonizing, resonating, shaking the windows in the pain, bending the laws of physics to the pure hearts of children for the length of a song from a Broadway musical
that made two brilliant, kind, ignored women cry
briefly
and lifted us to a place we weren’t old enough to understand.
