November 21, 2018

A poem in which I am not the victim
 
 
At five years old
I am pushed off my scooter by a boy with dark hair.
I sit in silence as I wait for the teacher to escort me to the nurse’s office.
She tells me,
“you know he’s just messing with you because he likes you, right?”
At five years old I am not sure what that means
but I hold it in my hands like a keepsake.
We pass this down through generation after generation.
“He’s doing it because he likes you.”
Teaching young girls.
This is what love looks like.
Teaching young girls to mistake abuse for flirting.
This isn’t what love looks like.
By 9 years old I know exactly what to do
when a boy in my class trips me on the playground.
He laughs with his friends but I don’t.
I want to yell and scream and kick and trip him too.
But I don’t.
I have been taught not to make a scene.
Don’t retaliate because he’s only doing it to get a rise out of you.
Here,
rise means reaction.
Here, rise means let him keep playing with you
because you can’t win.
Get up.
Wipe your nose.
And limp back home quietly.
By 13 I have met my first man
that whispered things to me that only belong in the bedroom.
Baby, you look so good.
I am already familiar with
the art of melding my emotions into a plastered on smile.
The art of forcing every howl I feel into a whimper.
You taught me this.
Remember.
I am constantly weighing my safety in one hand
and the need to yell at the top of my lungs to any man
within a 20-foot radius of me to
“Fuck off”
in the other.
I always choose the safer one.
At 16 I am still fighting this.  
“He’s just doing it to get a rise out of you.”
Here, rise means to fight.
He’s doing it because he knows I won’t cry about it.
Because then I’d actually have feelings, right?
He’s doing it because he knows that I won’t speak out.
Because I’ve lost if do.
And lost if I don’t.
He’s doing it because he knows I won’t yell.
Because ladies aren’t loud.
He’s doing it because nobody ever taught him he shouldn’t.