Requiem for a Blue Woman

CW: sexual assault, trauma, misogyny, violence

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I’m fourteen. At a party, a boy I have a crush on informs me

that blue balls is deeply painful and could be fatal,

which is why it's so important that I not be a tease.

He tells me that my best friend is the type of girl

that men will want to marry, while I am the type of girl

that men will want to fuck.

This all seems true. At night,

I climb from my bedroom window when I can’t sleep,

feeling the clear pleasure of my strong body

carrying me through haunted fields of corn,

breathing in the clean fullness

of the moon. But I’m still thinking

about the boy;

measure my hips with lengths of my hands in the dark,

wonder if maybe they were smaller that

perhaps someone would think I was beautiful enough to marry.

I’m nineteen. My professor tells me

that I am irresistible, murmuring something else

unintelligible as he crouches

between my thighs;

could be a lesson, could be a curse,

could be a prayer. I wonder

if this is power. I think that maybe it is, or at least

all the power that is available

to someone like me.

I'm twenty-one. My lover rapes me,

and the whole time says I love you, shhh, I love you

so much.

(Definitely a curse.)

Twenty-two: I'm starving,

so I get a job dancing at a strip club. I like feeling the long muscles of my body again,

and I like the power of the smoky stage:

worship me, don’t touch me.

I last four nights before a customer comes lurching up, seizes me, leering wetly

without any worship to speak of.

I punch him in the face. It doesn’t go over well.

Twenty-three: my boss pulls his dick out when we're alone,

presses it against my leg. I tell no one. I remember that

it won’t go over well.

My lover, a new one, says:

You just see rape everywhere, don't you?

I'm twenty-six and I'm drunk at a bar with my friends.

I go home with a perfectly nice man, the friend of a friend, vetted;

he's lovely, strokes my hair in the Uber when I lay my spinning head

in his lap. The driver says something to him

and they laugh together in a way

I can't decipher – am not meant to understand.

We arrive at his house and he starts kissing me in the doorway, gentle but insistent,

unbuttoning my jeans. I'm surprised and instantly, drunkenly furious

with myself for being surprised.

Weigh the options: don’t make this a thing. Be cool. You can sleep

after. He gets what he wants. We never speak again. He asks a girl

with a sweet smile and a fancy job to marry him.

I remember why.

I'm the one you fuck. I am a series of parts,

like a Picasso woman:

painted eye, bended knee, rich sweet flesh, muscle diminished. No soul to speak of,

not anymore.

I'm twenty-nine and I sleep

with a knife next to my bed. I read an article about modern men

needing to step into their masculinity,

so that women can fully inhabit their femininity

(I am wondering what the fuck this means). My single male friends complain

that women always want to know how tall they are

(I am thinking of the impossible mass of my ex pinning my body down, how

my good strong muscles failed me). My rich female friends

take pole classes to feel empowered

(I am thinking: you don't know what it's like

to be hungry, to have to).

I meet yet another woman who has never had an orgasm;

yet another man who brags about his ability to make any woman squirt.

I hold a sobbing woman in a dirty bathroom

whose husband has had an affair

two months after she’s given birth to their first child.

I remember that I’ve always been told

that the attention of men, or better yet,

their love

is a prize.

I wonder how any of us will get out alive,

any of us, a single

one.

The boy who told me about blue balls

is getting married this year. I think about the fact

that I know a little more, now,

about what power really is.

I curl in the center

of my silent bed, I shut my phone off, I sleep at last

without any dreams – none

at all.