I lie face down on the black leather couch. After three years of coming here, I am finally weeping.

I hear him rise from his black leather chair, feel the air swoop as the blanket falls over me. Gently, he smoothes it around my shoulder; I hadn’t expected such a gesture. He’s an analyst, after all. Yet, it feels right.

Back in his seat, I sense him leaning forward, head bowed, hands clasped between his knees. He is my witness.

My arm, sleeved in cashmere, covers my face. I am steeping in memory, forget how old I am, middle-aged I suppose, heart flash-frozen at thirteen.

The Sondheim song spins, round in my head. Last night, alone, I played it over and over. Ethereal and so sad, I never realized. The bid for clowns made me think of her, though I don’t know why. I cried inconsolably like the child I once was.

~

I see her in the kitchen. Springtime, she’s fixing supper, her gingham house dress hugging her form. I sit at the table, reading aloud my geography text. I’m content just to be in the room with her. The metal scent of screens mingles with the twilight air, marking the hour I educate her−tonight of watery places. Their names, all poetry to me: Isthmus of Panama, Straits of Gibraltar, Marianna Trench, Lake Meade; the pulsing cadence, soothing, incantatory.

Below us, in the basement, a turtle conch from the Philippines hums a chorus of the ocean. When I was small she held to my ear. I found it beautiful and then fascinating, how it cradled in its chamber the might of the sea.

The days lengthen. In the dining room, dust motes twirl in columns of sunlight. On my knees, I’m waxing the mahogany. She sits at the window sill, chatting on the phone with her sister. They are laughing like schoolgirls. She doodles in blue ink; cups and saucers in the curled margins of the yellow telephone directory. On the backs of torn envelopes she scribbles grocery lists, saves the loose-leaf for notes, sometimes to my teacher.

Seventh grade finally ends. I’ve wiggled my way into the popular group. My best friend and I make prank calls to strangers. We think this is funny. She invites me for dinner, so I dial my mom.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come home?” she asks, as if I’m the one who’s wavering.” I’ve made roast beef, one of your favorites.”

“That sounds good, Mom,” I say, hoping my warmth will tide her over. “Save me some leftovers? I won’t be too long.”

~

Midsummer, I’m off swimming at the pool, mastering the back dive. She sleeps in her bedroom, tangled up in the sheets, pale and incoherent. A week before, she was quarantined at the hospital, thrashing about, tied to the bedrails. We stood in the corridor, faces poked through the doorway, our words (“We’re here, Mom … getting better… home soon…miss you”) sailing across the room, straining to reach her.

“Meningitis,” they said, though they hadn’t a clue. Finally, they released her.

“Exhaustion,” they concluded.

The morning she returns, I race to the front porch at the sound of wheels, the engine cut to an eerie silence. Eternity passes. I can barely move or breathe. From the driver’s side, my father appears, then, circles to her door before craning to lift her. I don’t understand why she slumps into his frame, why he practically carries her.

I steady the door as they shuffle through, a rhyming couplet, a living pieta. He sets her down on the sofa, head flopping beneath the weight of the mass lurking in her brain, growing like a grapefruit. Only an autopsy will eventually reveal it.

Either she doesn’t know me or can’t say my name. “It’s Patsy” my dad exclaims.

“Patsy,” she repeats, as if learning to speak.

Stunned, I stumble through the downstairs before lurching onto the back porch where I’ve been known to dance and sing. I clutch my chest, because I can’t inhale, then crumple to the ground, choking and sobbing.

Days later, my friends and I are planning a funfair, my debut as gypsy fortune-teller. She’s not supposed to wake up, while I hold my breath and tiptoe toward her bureau.

“What are you doing?” I hear her say.

“Borrowing some jewelry for a fair we’re having,” I answer, not daring to face her. “I’m supposed to be the gypsy; I read palms and predict the future. I’ll bring them back as soon as it’s over.”

“You never help me,” she scolds, before drifting back off. I gaze out the window, fists  dripping with rhinestones, the green world calling.

“Help you?” I want to scream. “How am I supposed to help you? You’re always asleep. Most of the time, you don’t even make sense.”

Days later, she disappears.

“A seizure,” my father explains, hours after I’ve come home from the pool, darting up and down the stairs, yelping for her. He’d rushed her to the hospital. There wasn’t time to leave a note.

I wonder if she’ll ever come back, as I think about lilacs, how she gathered them in vases. At the hospital, she dreams of her dead mother. “I’m tired,” and, “Take care of Patsy,” she moans to anyone in sight, especially my father, seizing his arm, her gray eyes glaring.

The nurse phones at dawn on a Sunday morning, “Mr. Finn, your wife’s condition is very grave.”

A flock of dresses eyes me from the closet. What to wear poses the biggest question.

Am I a girl or a woman?

The minute hand won’t move. The wardrobe doesn’t answer.

We weren’t late. She died moments after we got the call. It wasn’t my fault, but still, I blamed myself all my life as if I had been selfish, as if I were a criminal. How could I have known, at thirteen, that my world had overturned and nothing could be done, that my need for control was perfectly normal?

Eighth grade, acorns thud into puddles of leaves. My mind fingers a stone, ponders it ceaselessly. Never, it reads. Never, I repeat, over and over. Once, the word had meaning, but in the reciting, it gets whittled down to nonsense. The unconscious fails in its attempt to represent absence.

Before long, I recite all manner of things, facts and formulas, stirring lines of literature, skeins of poetry, and litanies of prayer. I held onto my mind, but the girl that was me, I can’t seem to locate. Even beyond the closet, choosing is still difficult. Things often aren’t quite right. Almost always, something is missing.

In my mind, I open the door, while alone in the living room, she sits very still. Her face looks vacant, disapproving, I think.

Hot tears graze my cheeks, while a voice inside whispers, “You have to say, ‘good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” I say, sounding like I mean it.

It is necessary, sometimes, to be firm.

Patricia Heim is a psychotherapist in private practice in Philadelphia. She received both her B. A. and M.A. from Immaculata University and post-graduate training from the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Pat lives with her husband on a farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania and writes with the Greater Philadelphia Wordshop studio.

Read an interview with Pat Heim here.

“Man Attempting to Comprehend his Place in the Universe, Time, and Space,” Darwin Leon.

“That was lethal,” my mother said, closing the front door behind her.

I didn’t know if she meant lethal for me to have downed three vodka screwdrivers before getting behind the wheel of my car, lethal to have arrived drunk at a college friend’s New Year’s Eve party the night before, or both. My parents and I had just returned from a neighbor’s house where my father wrote a check to repair the lawn I detoured through on the way home, churning up sod and sideswiping trees. Before disappearing into his study, he ordered me to come up with a repayment plan, the extent of my punishment. His restraint surprised me until I remembered that his own chronic recklessness with alcohol made it awkward for him to sound too disapproving.

In time, my parents came to refer to that incident as a typical youthful bender, a rite of passage for an eighteen-year-old boy who had reached the legal drinking age a few months before. I saw it that way, too, though it ceased to look so harmless in the wake of subsequent alcohol-related calamities. Factor in my childhood exposure to my father’s copious drinking, and my troubles with alcohol later in life, and that New Year’s Eve scene turns into an omen that I should have taken more seriously. Gulping alcohol has always been my way of pounding my nerves into submission; in those days, three drinks was the minimum required to get me out of the house to a social engagement.

Later that year, my college roommate announced that he had invited two girls to our dorm room. I hurried out to buy a pint of vodka and a quart of orange juice to neutralize my shyness. I drank so avidly in preparation for the girls’ arrival (they only stayed for twenty minutes) that I passed out in my clothes and woke the next morning having wet the bed. A Halloween party that fall ended with me carried home in my devil costume, my roommates (one of whom had just completed reserve training at Quantico) chanting a Marine fight song as they marched me through the quad. After that, it became increasingly hard to laugh off my binges, and I have since given up alcohol many times for periods ranging from a week to a year. Today, I strictly limit my intake with regard to when, where, how much, and how often I drink, but I have not stopped for good, a failing that I blame on alcohol’s power to extinguish my anxiety.

For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from phobias provoked by crowds, heights, enclosed spaces, and social interaction. Even alone and remote from any threat, I am subject to apprehension with no identifiable cause. By quelling these symptoms, alcohol makes me feel right in a way I never do when sober, a way that I imagine people who don’t crave it feel all the time. In his article “Who Falls to Addiction, and Who is Unscathed,” the physician Richard Friedman suggests that drug and alcohol abusers “may have blunted reward systems in the brain, and that for them everyday pleasures don’t come close to the powerful reward of drugs.” A study in the Archives of General Psychiatry confirms alcohol’s attractiveness and its danger when used as a balm for anxiety.

…of 34,653 American adults, 13% of the people who had consumed alcohol or drugs in the previous year said they’d done so to reduce their anxiety, fear, or panic about a situation….People with diagnosed anxiety disorders

who self-medicated at the start of the study were two to five times more likely than those who did not self-medicate to develop a drug or alcohol problem within three years.

My affinity for alcohol began in my father’s bar, a tiny room centrally located between our house’s living room and den. Its contents reflected his pride in being able to serve anyone’s beverage of choice on demand. A small antiquated refrigerator always stocked a six-pack of Heineken for him and my three older brothers, a bottle of rosé for my mother’s nightly two glasses, a vintage white or red wine for dinner, and on holidays a magnum of champagne wedged between ice-trays in the freezer. A cupboard held half gallons of vodka and gin alongside various expensive whiskeys received as gifts or earmarked for guests. Reserve cases of beer and wine filled a narrow closet.

I never had any difficulty obtaining alcohol growing up. My brothers were too prolific in their drinking to miss the Heinekens I carried out to my tree fort in the woods, and there were enough leftover bottles of dinner wine that I could sneak one up to my bedroom while my parents napped. A six-pack of beer and bottles of my mother’s rosé accompanied me back to boarding school after each vacation, swaddled in my duffel bag. If my father had discovered me pilfering his booze, his reaction would likely have been “That’s my boy.” He was far more eager to educate me in the rituals of alcohol than to shield me from its dangers.

When I was ten, he taught me how to make a mint julep by mashing mint leaves against the bottom of a tumbler filled with Jack Daniels. I poured this concoction over crushed ice, stirred in a packet of Sweet N’ Low—a nod to his current diet—and served it to him on the patio in a frosted silver goblet. I hated the taste, just as I hated the Budweisers that my uncle expected me to have open for him when he visited, but delighted my elders by taking healthy swigs from these drinks before handing them over. When I turned seventeen and my father allowed me my own glass of wine at dinner, I had been accepting sips from his glass for years. By then I had already acquired a taste for beer and wine and made myself sick enough on scotch, gin, rum, and tequila that I have never been tempted by them since.

At boarding school, drinking felt like a natural rather than a criminal activity. On weekend nights, I’d sit in the window of my dorm room with a smuggled bottle of my mother’s rosé. These solitary sessions would have astonished my classmates, who tended to break rules boastfully and in groups, and who knew me as the straightest of straight arrows, not just because I played sports, studied hard, and wore bland preppy clothes, but because I was so shy. None of my close friends drank, and I wouldn’t have dared approach anyone who did to invite myself along on a debauch. I had been getting drunk alone since I was thirteen and didn’t crave company or recognition. I drank to ease the anxiety that I felt in my school’s academically and socially competitive environment.

After midnight one Saturday, a boy strode into my room to borrow a book while I was occupied with my bottle of Mateus. He stared at me with a combination of surprise and respect before wordlessly accepting a glass. By the next day—or perhaps that evening after he left to spread the word—my reputation had undergone a dramatic makeover. One of the chronic miscreants who lived on the floor below passed me on the way to Sunday brunch, and with a medley of winks, nods, and oblique compliments let me know that he knew that I wasn’t as innocent as I seemed. This was unwelcome news—I knew how naughty I was and saw no profit in others knowing too, especially an image-conscious slacker unlikely to make it to graduation.

In college, where my multiple roommates made solitude impossible, my drinking retained its private aspect, as I focused on ingesting alcohol rather than enjoying the party. Several times a week my roommates and I partook of a local bar’s happy hour, surrounded by other freshmen. As my friends paid attention to each other and to the girls in the room, I hurried to get drunk enough to cope with any of the latter approaching our table.  An observer would have thought the scene harmless—a college freshman relaxing in boisterous good company. I was passing my courses and playing two sports. Looked at another way, I was spending most of my evenings drunk and much of the rest of my time looking forward to getting drunk. A ubiquitous public service ad at that time warned, “If you’re drinking to be social, it’s not social drinking.” Then what is it, I wondered, and why do it? Why not switch to ginger ale?

Even in comfortable company, with a friend or two in my dorm room, I outpaced everyone. I couldn’t plead social or other stresses at these times; getting drunk was a race to get out of my mind as quickly as possible. My tendency to pass out early usually spared me embarrassments like the New Year’s Eve drive and Halloween march. An exception occurred one evening in the college dining hall. Primed by several pre-dinner beers, a friend and I sat near two boys who lived in our dorm—precocious intellectuals who dressed conservatively and read The Wall Street Journal. I began making fun of the pair in a loud voice, mocking their dress and speech as my friend tried to shush me. “I think we’re being insulted,” one said as they rose to leave.

The memory of that scene still mortifies me, as if a demon had seized my tongue and forced me to speak as someone I neither was nor wanted to be. I can’t remember how I faced the boys in the dorm afterward, but three years later on the eve of commencement I encountered one of them walking through a quiet neighborhood near campus. Before he could stride past, I stopped him and apologized for my behavior as a freshman. He listened, nodded in acceptance, and walked away. Even if my immaturity mitigates my offense somewhat, it’s hard not to find evidence of alcoholism in my drinking at that age, my future temperance notwithstanding.

I first noticed the duality between drinking as fun and as destructive behavior in my father’s practice. On a typical weekday he might have a cocktail and wine at lunch with his Wall Street cronies, one or two beers in a Penn Station bar while waiting for his commuter train, another in the bar by our local Long Island station before my mother picked him up, a glass of sherry upon arriving home and wine with dinner. On vacations he’d announce at breakfast the precise time he planned to start drinking that morning. Once a year, usually on New Year’s Day, he went on the wagon as part of a new diet or on doctor’s orders for hypertension. After a week or so his resolve faltered, especially if one of my older brothers arrived home and began draining Heinekens in front of him.

My ex-wife used to press me to admit that my father was an alcoholic, and I’d exasperate her by demanding a precise definition of the word. How could a man so successful warrant that label? He was a Wall Street lawyer who worked full-time into his seventies and retained several clients beyond that age. He provided for his family, came home in time for dinner when he wasn’t traveling or preparing for trial, attended graduations and sports events, and took us on vacation to Bermuda every March. He was also a surly, vindictive drunk who humiliated my mother and taught his children to avoid him, and whose scorn left psychological scars on every member of his family. He showed up intoxicated and limping at my sister’s wedding after causing a car accident on the way to the church. Alcoholic? It depends how you look at it.

Perhaps my quibbling over labels betrays my reluctance to diagnose myself; I have drunk so sparingly for the past twenty years that there’s little outward evidence of a problem. A friend in AA jokes that if he had my self-control he’d never have had to quit drinking, though his sobriety demands far more discipline than mine. I simply avoid alcohol in situations where it impairs me. After squeezing my four-year-old son’s arm too hard during a beer-fueled scolding, I stopped drinking in his presence, and have not done so for the past twenty-one years. Realizing that disagreements were likelier to turn ugly if I was even mildly hungover, I stopped drinking around my girlfriend. In my thirties I stopped drinking in my parents’ house, where moderation was impossible in the face of my father’s persistent hospitality. My final withdrawal came a few years ago when two glasses of wine made me so inarticulate at a dinner party that I stopped drinking in public.

Today I only drink by myself, some wine or cognac on week-end nights when my family is asleep. I’d like to say that I stop after achieving a pleasant buzz, but in truth I drink the way I always have, fast and purposefully until the alcohol blots out my anxiety. As long as I stick to a strict schedule, I tell myself, I need never join my friend in recovery. Besides, what difference would it make if I stopped? My longing for alcohol would continue, and the only negative effect of my solitary binges is a slight hangover the next morning. That and my awareness that I cannot stop, and that calling my drinking harmless is as self-deluding as when I drove across the neighbor’s lawn thirty-five years ago.

In his essay “Under the Influence” Scott Russell Sanders worries that growing up with an alcoholic father has made him susceptible to abusing alcohol himself. As an adult, he confines himself to “…once a week, perhaps, a glass of wine, a can of beer, nothing stronger, nothing more.” Sanders recalls seeing his father take his first drink of the day: “I watch the amber liquid pour down his throat, the alcohol steal into his blood, the key turn in his brain.” For me that key turns when my first sip begins to deaden the quickened, frantic feeling that anxiety maintains in me. Nothing else, not therapy or meditation or success or love has given me such relief, and that’s why I do not or cannot give up drinking for good.

A few years ago I mentioned my fondness for English beer to my son and he said, “But I’ve never seen you take a drink.” Drinking alone allows me to keep my troubled relationship with alcohol a secret. People who know me would laugh at the idea of me being an alcoholic or even concerned about the possibility. At parties, my request for water or ginger ale elicits curious looks as I imagine strangers speculating about my alcoholic past. Like a man with that grim history, my outward temperance belies an inner craving. I look forward to my weekly ration more than to anything in my life. “Right now I would eat hot glass / if it got in the way of this fantasy” a line in a friend’s poem goes. When it comes to alcohol, that’s how I feel.

Michael Milburn teaches English in New Haven, Connecticut. His essays have recently appeared in New England Review and Hippocampus. His third book of poems, Carpe Something, will appear this summer from Word Press.

Check out our feature on Michael here.

“The Rape,” oil on canvas, Darwin Leon

In the early 1970s, ’71 or ’72, I think, (see how already the narrative breaks down), I was raped by a man I did not know.

I was 13 or I was 12. I was in the 8^th grade or in the 7^th, both years lost, only an image left, an English teacher, who had dyed black hair, who was kindly, who asked me in the middle of class one day if I were okay, if I needed to leave the room, to go home. She touched me on the shoulder, I want to say. (What is the right narrative?) I don’t know what I was doing or what I looked like to cause her such alarm; I only remember sitting on the end of the row nearest the door and her asking me if I were okay, and my mother telling me later (so even this is wrong; where is the silence I only remember?) that this teacher had had a daughter raped too and so she was concerned for me, she understood. I don’t know if a year had passed by then or if it were in the same year; I don’t know if I left the class or if I stayed.

~

Most of my life I have not remembered this man’s name, this boy’s. (He was 19, and, at 52 now, I realize that I cannot think of him as anything else), and I won’t give him his name here, even though once I had the idea of looking his record up, of researching his life as if that would prove my indifference to him finally. He met me half way up the lane along the cemetery to our house; he must have watched from the graves as I stepped off the school bus. He asked me his question. I answered him. Politely. (I’ve read somewhere now that young girls are most often attacked because of this vulnerability. We are asked to be nice, to be helpful. And so we are.) He came up to me on the driveway by the cemetery. He asked me where the Smiths were. I told him. I pointed the way for him and then I turned away. Without fear.  Without surprise. (Small comfort, this, when I hear of another young girl or woman raped, murdered–I think when I was lying on the ground and he was finally leaving me that he could so easily have put his hands around my throat and I would have died. Or he could have stabbed me with a knife and I would have died. Without fear. Without surprise. Everything happened so quickly; everything was simply something that happened–detached, removed from me, my every sense heightened, but not in fear, only in wonder, only in minute-by-minute half-comprehensions. What I hope for those other women.)

He put his arms were around me from the back and said not to scream. He tried to punch me in the stomach but my coat was thick and sturdy and I felt none of it. He said he wanted to go steady, for me to be his girlfriend, all the time taking me further into the woods. The only fear I remember now was when he pushed me to the ground and ripped my pants from me and the wad of gum I had been chewing jammed up against my throat and I was afraid I would choke so I turned my head to the side to spit it out. I saw the dead leave then, what I remember most. He lay on me. I felt pain. Later a lawyer would ask me in court if I thought he had used his fingers to “penetrate” me. (I didn’t know what he meant. I had never been with a boy. Why would anyone want to put their fingers there?)

I bit him. Not bravely. He put his fingers near my mouth, so I bit him. He stood above me, crying. He said I had hurt him. He backed away from me into the woods, still crying. Only then was I afraid, that he might return. I wrapped my torn pants around my waist and ran to the barbed-wire fence that ran along the roadside. A man on a tractor appeared. I waved at him, crying. (He must have been a farmer in the area, but I don’t remember who he was and no one ever said anything to me about him.) I don’t remember how we got to my neighbor’s, if I rode his tractor or if he walked me there.  I sat on the couch with the girl I went to school with who lived in this house with no plumbing, no mother.  My parents were out of town, in Florida. There was no one to come and get me. I don’t know if I rode in a police car or if an ambulance took me someplace. My mother would tell me later how she wept and cried at the airline ticket counter in Florida, begging the airlines to give her a ticket home so that she could be with me. (There is that other narrative. And yet I keep saying we never spoke of it.) I was examined; evidence taken. I remember little of this: nurses talking to me, the curtain they pulled around the bed, perhaps some more pain. Medical students in a residency program my father oversaw came to take me home–I think. They had been staying with me. I don’t remember how we got home. I do remember vividly passing through our gate and being greeted by the large pack of dogs that roamed our farm and how much I wished that I had made it that far, to the gate, to the dogs that would have helped me. (I have kept dogs ever since.)

My mother arrived sometime late at night. I was asleep or half sleeping. She appeared, weeping. I remember little else of that night. My father offered a large reward for information regarding this boy.  He and I drove to the sheriff’s station one night, sat in the back of an unmarked car with the overhead light turned off and watched the sheriff call a possible suspect out of his home or out of a bar. I don’t know which. I didn’t recognize him. I think there was a lineup at some point, but I don’t know for sure. A young man my father and mother had befriended told them about seeing someone at a bar that night, with a band-aid on his finger. He had been bragging. He was arrested. We went to court.

My mother told me that I needed to do this, that the boy had attacked other young girls my age, that each time he had gone a little further, obviously accelerating what he was doing, that he had to be stopped in case he killed someone. That I had to be the someone to stop him. I remember little of the trial. My mother and father would take me, before or after, for ice cream. I don’t know what we talked about. I found out later, or I think my mother told me, (here again, that narrative of silence falters), that the judge for the case was the father of a young girl in my class. My mother made me a dress for the day I testified. It was red. It had blue anchors on it and a white collar. My mother said that I was so young it was really bad for this man. (I didn’t know that at the same time I was going through trial, women’s groups in the seventies were fighting to change rape laws that had forced women to prove physical resistance to the attack and personal chastity.) I don’t remember what I said in court or what was said to me except for that question about the fingers. At the end, he was convicted. I sat in the courtroom when the sentence was announced. The police led this boy past me. His mother appeared from the rows across the aisle, crying, “You told me you didn’t do it. You told me you didn’t do it.” I think I threw the red dress away, but I don’t know.

~

I think of the nineteen-year-old boys I teach in college now, the friends of my daughters, how young they are. Of the life I’ve had these past thirty-nine years–school, college, graduate school, marriage, children, work. A man, a good man, who loves me. Only last year my mother told me that “this guy,” she called him, had gotten out of prison after twenty-five years. (Could this even be right? I have been married twenty-five years and didn’t marry until thirteen years after this rape. Where is my narrative now?) I think of the Super Max prison in Florence, Colorado. And of the men I read about who are in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, for years and years. I am not sure what we are trying to accomplish. I ask myself if even this boy deserved to be imprisoned for so long for such a stupid act when he was nineteen. (I remember hearing that my father, every year the boy came up for parole, submitted his statement that he shouldn’t be released. Later my mother telling that this boy’s sentence was extended over and over again, not because of me, but because of what he did in prison. “It’s not about you anymore,” she told me.) I don’t know what this boy did in prison. I don’t know how many other girls he touched before me that day. I don’t know what might have happened if he had not been stopped, had not been imprisoned. I did good, I tell myself.

Today I know this about rape–my own is insignificant. In 2008, after decades, centuries of systematic rape, the United Nations Security Council finally recognized “that women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war.” As of today, 200,000 women raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo: forty women a day. 200,000 women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War. 20,000 women raped during the Bosnian War. In Liberia, 92 percent of 1600 women interviewed reporting sexual violence. Rape as a tool of war in Darfur, Uganda, Sierra Leone. Women not just incidentals now in the course of a war, but chattels of patriarchal societies, defiled to dishonor, to harm a man, his family.  Hundreds of thousands of women raped multiple times until their bodies are irreparably injured, until they bear the children of their rapists, and, through some grace, must still love these children, even as their own families ostracize, isolate, shame, humiliate, stone, kill them.

I know that there are women in refugee camps today, their men gone, dead, who are forced to gather wood or water or to take their children somewhere outside of these camps, their tents, to defecate. And they are raped. And their children raped. I think of the small inventions that can save them: the stove that does not need wood, the small community well dug for potable water. Amnesty International reports that Native American women are two and a half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than other women in the United States. I think of the women teachers I have worked with on the reservation for the past six years. What have they been through? What have they seen their daughters suffer? Their granddaughters? Even the statistics tell us nothing: most Native American women are reluctant to report sexual assault given the lack of assistance they are given in the process and the few times the perpetuators are even convicted. And yet it is the men who are the “holy” men, the only ones who can hear the holy voices. As in every society.

I know now that I perpetuated a crime in my silence, that every moment of my silence meant another moment of secrecy for a sect no woman wants to be a part of, that no woman should be blamed for. (No one said anything to me that I remember, except for the one English teacher whose daughter had been raped, who might have touched me in tenderness. Well, I know now I want to say that, to keep the narrative, but I know I am wrong. One day I was riding horses with a friend—round hair, round face, round cheeks in the sunlight on her horse. “You know what they are saying about you, don’t you? You should go to another school. Move away,” she said. Later my mother wanted to write the school a note for the principal to read over the intercom, to thank everyone for how good they had been to me. I had told my mother nothing of what had been said or not said.

“Where is my little sunshine?” my mother once asked me, forgivable now because I see the silence was mine, not hers.)

My daughter asks me a simple question: why should a penis have power over a woman? And I feel a physical shock. I have no answer for that. She tells me of a village where rape is unheard of simply because the society will not accept the idea of rape, that somehow the penis could be more powerful than the vagina, that a man taking a woman should mean ruin for anyone. I think of the simple physiology of that moment when I was raped–what I can’t even remember well, describe well, have not even forgotten well. I know now that my single experience, my five minutes, has cost me more than I should ever have allowed myself to pay, and that this is the real narrative.

Here I am: poet, essayist. I am supposed to transform all this into something, some metaphor about trees and rock, about a spinning wheel and a woman who keeps ripping out the shroud of her life, but I can’t. And now I won’t.

Kathryn Winograd, poet and essayist, is author of Air Into Breath (Ashland Poetry Series), winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Stepping Sideways Into Poetry (Scholastic, Inc), a classroom resource book for K12 teachers. She recently won 1st place in the Non-rhyming Poetry category of the Writer’s Digest 80th Annual Writing Competition 2011, and 1st place in the Chautauqua Poetry contest. Her essay, “Bathing” was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2011 and is included in The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction along with “(Note to Self): The Lyric Essay.” Recent or forthcoming publications include Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Hotel Amerika, Puerto del Sol, and Literary Mama.

Read an interview with Kathryn here.