#MeToo

I Believe Her

By Matthew Donovan

I believe her because
her story gains her nothing.
Some of those she tells
say she’s seeking attention.
They say she’s ruining
his reputation.

I believe her because
it happens each day.
And because it’s in me
to do what she says
was done.

I believe her because she,
not I—lived it. Those that
cling to power deny it, or
say it’s forgivable
boys’ behavior.

I believe her because
we have it easy—crossing
alleyways and parking
garages; traveling alone
to the restroom. We cover
one another’s lies, even
as doing so ruins lives.

I believe her because
the wolves inside me
are only sleeping.

Matthew Donovan (he/him) is a retired, professional firefighter currently working for a local government. He was born and raised in the Bronx, and now lives in Connecticut with his wife Stephanie and their daughters. His poetry has been published in Permafrost, BarBar, Southern Quill, The Seraphic Review, and others.

Photo by Lucy Maude Ellis via a Creative Commons license.

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Man with a Knife

By Tara Stillions Whitehead

ENTER death as sound blackening an already shadowy scene—as a long, hard lament from the HORN of the failed getaway car. Then, as a YOUNG WOMAN. Everything is lost; everyone has lost. At this distance, death is an exquisite execution of convention. A triumph of method acting. Near-perfect cinema. It will be studied and taught and adapted and celebrated for its shape.

It is easy to rage over a newly motherless child.

It happened in broad daylight. It happened at night. It unmistakably happened. It was day. It was night. It was. (It still is.) He bent him over, he broke him in half, he bent him until he broke and couldn’t be put back together again. He told him this is a common occurrence. He used the word occurrence by mistake. This is how guys let off steam, he said. This is how you make friends in the business, he said. And this is how you get away with it. Over here, behind the condor, between the generator and the empty two-banger. It’s fast, he said. It’s hard. It hurts, he said. But that’s okay. That’s part of it, he said. That’s part of what makes it great. When you’re older, you’ll appreciate it, he said. The pain. You’ll see I’m right, he said, in a voice that was sure, in a body anticipating relief. And then he folded the boy hard into that posture that broke him. He demonstrated, the boy said in a documentary twenty years later, how to ruin a life.

ENTER deception as a WOMAN whom we have never seen but whose rumored infidelities keep the emotional plot moving, whose fatal intrigue is meant to distract the players from burgeoning political avarice. While the newspapers pay for pictures, big money for images of fucking or almost fucking someone else’s husband, someone desiccates the orange groves to the north, slakes penniless farmers with broken promises, and forges the names of the dead. The inland empire is ripe for annexing, the groomed child is ripe for killing.

ENTER a millionaire to execute both. It’s savage. It’s noir. It’s a captivating example of how to unravel humanity on a screen.

It’s easy to rage over pictures that hide the truth.

I’ve told the bloggers, she says. I’ve told the LA Times, she says. Didn’t you see my interview on The Talk? Read my sworn affidavit, she says. Read all three of them. Forget the Deadline Hollywood nonsense. It’s a hashtag epidemic. It’s total bologna. I know my husband. I know everything about him, more than his doctors. He sleeps in the fetal position—when he sleeps—and he only fucks women, okay? Vaginas. Tits. Never anal. Not even plugs. A wife knows, okay. Ask me anything. That beauty mark that made him a millionaire is a chicken pox scar. He didn’t grow up in Reseda. He’s from rural Pennsylvania. His mother was Mennonite and he didn’t learn to drive until he was twenty-fucking-three years old. His father died of sepsis after he severed his hand in a grain mill, and his sister Lucy committed suicide at ten. Ten. If that doesn’t fuck you—Look, E. worked his ass off to float to the top of this cesspool. He didn’t fuck that casting director’s kid in the back of his town car. He didn’t sodomize any child stars. It’s a hashtag epidemic. It’s social media. It’s a lot of angry women and crying faggots, okay? This isn’t just business these people are fucking with. It’s the whole entertainment industry. Thousands of people. It’s livelihood—yours, E.’s, and mine. Everyone’s. My husband doesn’t fuck kids, okay. A wife knows. Now put this bitch to bed so we can get back to production.

ENTER truth as obscenity, as a confession: She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister and she’s my daughter. It is cunning and unexpected. It is one of the most spectacular scenes in all of film. Any film professor with a degree in cinema will assure us of it. The brutality, they say—

It is easy to rage over a fatherless daughter.

That’s great. You did great. Do you high five? Alright, high five! Okay, okay. So, next time we meet, it’ll be at my other office. Seventh floor of the Burbank building. The third office to the left. Be sure to wash up first, okay? You can’t be sticky during an audition. There’s a bathroom in the foyer off the elevator. It has good lighting. Take your time. Practice your lines for the new scene. Do whatever you gotta do to get warmed up, okay? Be sure to tell your mother to wait downstairs again. She’ll only distract you. Mothers are just distractions. Tell her to get a coffee and take a long walk through the studio store. Tell her she can buy anything she wants. You like Harry Potter? Avengers? The Flash? Of course you do. Tell her to give the cashier my name. It’s on me. Everything is on me. Isn’t that cool? It’s pretty cool, right? That’s what it’s like to be famous. You can buy anything you want. You can go anywhere you want. Do anything you want. It’s pretty cool. Hey, come here. A little closer. Yeah, right there. Perfect. Are you scared? Don’t be scared. It’s okay. I know what I’m doing. Trust me, okay? Can you trust me? Think about your mom and all the things you’ll be able to buy her. Think about how cool your house will be once you make it big. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing, okay. There. See. That’s not so bad, right? It’s kind of good, isn’t it? Right. Right. Now, tell me … how would you like to be famous?

Top 10 Anticipated Series in Development: [3/27/2020]

4. Untitled #metoo Project | NC-17 | Action – Drama – Suspense | Announced

Attorney who “would never put herself in a position to be raped” represents network mogul slammed with allegations that he sexually assaulted children and young actresses.

8-episode mini-series| Director: M. Garcea | Starring: C. Beavers, M. Roberts

One of the broken boys died of addiction. But not really. He died of pneumonia. But not really. Can shame kill? Because the boy’s blood was infected with it. And whether it was the shame that caused the emptiness that caused the use that caused the addiction that caused the pneumonia that caused his death—he can never confirm. Dead boys can’t defend themselves or explain. They can’t talk at all, not like living boys, the unbroken ones anyway.

It is easy to rage over a boy who cannot speak.

85 EXT. – STONE CANYON RESERVOIR – DAY – MAGIC HOUR (Omitted) 85*

LOW ANGLE BEHIND the feet of two men standing on the gravel perimeter of the empty reservoir. DARK RINGS mark varying latitudes of higher water levels, times long gone. One of the men, M., 37, wears khaki shorts and a bulletproof vest over his button-down. The dark-suited man to M.’s right, K., 55, speaks in sharp monotone throughout, hands resigned to his pockets. As the SUN SETS, we STAY ON the men’s backs, sometimes catch a glimpse of them in profile.

You’ve seen Chinatown, right?

K. nods.

M. (CONT’D)

The scene where Gittes gets his nose sliced. That
was shot right over there.

M. points off-screen.

M. (CONT’D)

Polanski played the attacker.

(pause)

He had a choice, you know. As the director. He
chose to be Man with a Knife. No name, just a man
and his weapon. He chose to play that role, to be the
one to say “kitty cat” instead of pussy. To be the
guy who disfigures Nicholson and tells him to stop
trying to uncover the truth. It was 1973. Polanski
had a thing for knives.

(turns to K.)

I’m not killing myself.

No one really wants that.

A lot of people sure sound like they do. Trolls, E.,
the media, lawyers—

(looks at K.)

Well, most of them.

Hey, I’m here for you, buddy.

These Twitter trolls. They’re stuck in a time warp.
I’m forty-two. I’m married and have two daughters.
But people see my name in their feeds and they
think time hasn’t passed. They think I’m still that
goofy kid they loved almost thirty years ago. How
could anything bad have ever happened to him, they
ask? He was so goofy and healthy, he never looked
hurt. But now they hate me. For nothing. For
nothing except telling the truth. People hate when
the truth gets in the way of what they believe, so if I
just disappear, if I’m not here to force them to
choose truth—

(stops himself)

Fuck.

The SUN lowers into frame, FLARES. The men become SILHOUETTES.

M. (CONT’D)

You know, Polanski experienced total brutality in
his life. He fled the Nazis. His mother died in
Auschwitz. He lost Sharon in the most horrific way.
His life is the culmination of catastrophic
circumstances. It’d be easy to forgive a person like
that, to say they were so fucked up as a kid, as a
young father-to-be, that they didn’t know how to do
things right.

(pauses)

Except that when you’ve been the victim, you know
what wrong is, and you know complicity. You
choose to do bad. Polanski had a choice. Those
kids—Sam Gailey, the girls in Gstaad—

(pauses)

They’ve heard it too. “You’re lying.” “Go kill
yourself.” “Give us back our brilliant Polanski.”

(pauses)

I’m not killing myself.

You have a lot to live for, pal.

People marvel at how Chinatown ends, how fucked
up it is. But they like it. They like that Gittes is too
powerless to save anyone. It makes their own
powerlessness okay. People thought it was real hard
to end a film that way given the circumstances of
Watergate, the paranoia and desire for transparency.
But then they saw their own powerlessness. And
they thought, well shit, here’s a movie that tells it
like it is.

(laughs)

Polanski knew his audience. He knew what he was
doing, what a film could really achieve.

(pauses)

You know, Gittes’s last line wasn’t in Townes’ final
draft. In the original ending, Gittes was livid,
berating the police, proselytizing justice while
Cross held his dead daughter, the one he fucked and
fathered another daughter with. In the original,
Gittes was real passionate about calling out
authority. He was angry and relatable. He was a
hopeful kind of fiction.

(pause)

But you’ve seen the movie. You know how it really ends.

(pause)

“As little as possible.” That’s the kicker right there.
That’s the tagline of this whole damn thing. That’s
the most real line I’ve ever heard in a film. Because
men can be broken. Gittes gets broken. The system
gets broken. And nobody cares enough to try to fix
it or the people it breaks. They just want their
money. They just want their stories.

It’s dark now. As we PULL BACK, as we RISE UP, REVEAL that trillion-dollar landscape built on stories: Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica; Hollywood, Pasadena, and Burbank, and the vast Pacific Ocean, which SCINTILLATES like broken glass, WINKING at us before it FADES beneath a blood-colored sky.

CUT TO:

BLACK and no credits. (No one will take credit.)

It is easy to rage over the inability to forget.

To do as little as possible.

I am a multi-genre writer and filmmaker who was assaulted off of the number one sitcom in the country and went on to pursue an MFA to unwrite and unteach the toxic Hollywood narratives. My work can be found in more than two dozen journals. Recent publications include cream city review, PRISM international, Monkeybicycle, The Rupture, and Pithead Chapel. I have received a Glimmer Train Award for New Writers, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and Pushcart Prize nominations. My first collection of stories, The Year of the Monster, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press.

Translated from the Portuguese

By Mark Blickley

Artist’s note:

This past fall, I co-curated an exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal, Tributaries, that opened on Sept. 30th and ran for ten weeks, under the auspices of the international artist’s cooperative, Urban Dialogues. While in Lisbon, I went into the oldest continuous bookstore in the world, Chiado Bertrand Bookstore, which was founded in 1732 (the year of George Washington’s birth). I found this Portuguese published book about Donald Trump that I immediately bought because a redacted title of the book jumped out at me, O Me Too, (which piggybacks nicely on the Me Too movement)). When I got home I was able to also redact “A Pee Poem” (alluding to the Steele dossier about the salacious incident of Trump hiring Russian prostitutes to pee on the bed where the Obamas slept in Moscow). And, as I progressed down the book cover, I was also able to redact Go More Anal and then I placed DJ-45 in front of a golden wall.

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. He is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books) and the forthcoming text based art book, Dream Streams (Clare Songbirds Publishing). His video, Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, was selected to the 2018 International Experimental Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain. He is a 2018 Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nevertheless We Persisted. Visit his website to learn more about Mark.

Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, Again

By Anastasia Vassos

She stops, breathless, she lifts her heel behind her to straighten her stocking before she pulls at her jacket to make sure there are no wrinkles, before she runs into H.R. breathless to tell Susan, who’s sitting at her desk, that Bob continues to make lewd comments and won’t let it go, no matter that she’s told him three times to stop it or she’ll go to H.R., but still, he persists and so she runs to tell Susan, who she hopes will do something, but if she doesn’t, it’ll be all over the news before the sun goes down, and it will feel as close as anything to victory.

(after Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, Temple of Athena Nike, Acropolis)

Anastasia Vassos is a poet living and writing in Boston, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared most recently in Gravel Mag, Haibun Today, The Literary Bohemian, and Right Hand Pointing. Her poem Tinos, August 2012, was published by MassPoetry.org, as Poem of the Moment in March 2017. She recently participated as a contributor at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. She is a long-distance cyclist.

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Female Fellow at the American Film Institute Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills, 1971

By Penny Perry

She pulled up in her dented VW, twenty
miles from her cockroach-filled kitchen.
Five feet tall, wearing a three-dollar dress
from Lerner’s. The dress long and black,
looked expensive. N.O.W. had picketed
the all male institute the year before.
Marble floors. Carved wood staircases.
Louis the 14th chairs. The study where
one Doheny murdered another.
The dining room with the gold chandelier
that tinkled and rose when Hitchcock
or Truffaut screened their latest film.

Most of the male fellows looked well-fed
and had smooth white hands. Over wine
and brie in the Great Hall that first night
the men surveyed the female fellows.
Will announced she had nice-sized breasts
for such a small girl. Gilbert whispered
the women here were dogs, present
company excepted. A compliment from Ivan:
Her dialog was sharp. She wrote like a man.
Sam said because she was a writer she wasn’t
a real woman. At dinner, she and a directing
fellow, Susan, sat across the table from

Gregory Peck. Head twirling: The Louis
14th chairs. The chandelier. Dizzy with
wine, she and Susan fantasized bowling
Sam’s head down a long marble hall. Work
days, bent over her dime-store notebook,
her pen unzipped the page. She wrote under
a gnarled sycamore. Her boys, two and three,
splashed in a stone fountain. One day, chicken
pox, red as poppies, bloomed on her sons.
Male fellows came down with the pox.
Sam had sores on his thumb and on his tongue,
a wound that would scab, but not heal.

Penny Perry is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Lilith, Redbook, Earth’s Daughter, the Paterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her first collection of poems, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012) earned praise from Marge Piercy, Steve Kowit, Diane Wakoski and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She writes under two names, Penny Perry and Kate Harding.

Photo credit: Doheny Mansion living room courtesy of University of California.

Bathsheba wants to write #metoo

By Crystal Stone

Her husband enlisted: eager to fight,
eager to serve. She was a good wife,
accepted this. She could argue, but why
fight? The last night the sun set pale
in their wine by the garden. The last
kiss was fragile—lips thin and chapped
with goodbyes. In his absence, she bathed
behind a wickerwork screen, enjoyed
the iridescent rainbows of shampoo bubbles,
the way soft light manicured her nails,
the curl of toes beneath hot water,
the volume of hair as humidity twirled
fingers around her loose locks. The king
would watch from the roof, share this private
moment with her. If the rainbow is god’s
promise to never flood the earth again,
why not her eyes, too? Or her body?
When a king calls, what can a servant do
but wait, for the coming to hang her
stomach in effigy of the life she once had
and the child to rip her sharply, as if only
worn fabric of her newly retired silk gown?

Crystal Stone is a first-year MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Her work has previously appeared in The Badlands Review, Green Blotter, North Central Review, Jet Fuel Review, Southword Journal Online and Dylan Days. When she’s not writing poems, you can find her on her roller skates blocking for Team United Roller Derby.

Photo credit: Image of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Bathsheba from Wikiart via a Creative Commons license.

By R.R. Marsh

#MeToo.

It took me several moments to post the words on my Facebook account. I had to think through my past—a place I generally prefer to avoid—and consider events I had ignored for quite some time. Had I been a victim of sexual assault? Or was I fashioning mere slips of male behavior into real offenses?

Sure, I’m a feminist, but I also live in the South. Around here, if you really want to insult a woman, you call her “reactionary.”

I was in tenth grade, on the newspaper staff, and walking around the school selling our latest edition. When I reached the vocational wing, where mostly boys learned automobile repair and woodworking, I timidly knocked on the classroom door and asked if anyone wanted to buy a paper.

One of the boys, I’m not sure who—only that he was big with a deep redneck accent—shouted, “no, but we’d sure like to buy you.”

Now at 5’7” and 85 pounds, I made beanpoles envious, but there I was on display before a dozen boys, all laughing at me—assessing me—thinking of what they might do if they bought me. The teacher, the only other female in the room, ignored the comment but commanded the class to shush. “Boys, boys,” she said. “Quiet down.” Once she regained their attention, I slipped out the door, shaking.

Still, I was a reporter, goddammit, and I couldn’t keep that story secret. By the next issue, I had detailed my experience and spoken out against the sexual harassment occurring in our school. My column fostered a discussion amongst the staff and faculty, who passed new rules for the following year—a tiny feather for my cap.

There’s one thing I didn’t include in that article. You see, when I returned to the newspaper office and, in a fury, recounted what had just happened to me, my editor—a senior, one of the most popular boys in school, privileged, desired and, at the time, dating one of my peers—well, he just chuckled. I would have to get used to it, he said. That was the way of the world.

I knew lots of girls in school who called themselves feminists, who read their Virginia Woolf and would have gladly marched for reproductive rights. But even in their eyes, my editor was a shooting star. It was one thing to talk about those other boys—you know, the kids who come from the wrong side of the tracks (or, in this case, the wrong side of the cow pasture). But speak out against him? Even if I dared, who would listen? And besides, I didn’t want to be that nerdy girl crashing everyone else’s party. My social standing always did fall short.

So, I chose to uncover an ugly truth while hiding an equally ugly secret, congratulating myself on affecting some measure of change, at least on the books. I was convinced those five minutes in the classroom followed by those five minutes with my editor had been worth the fear. The humiliation. The intimidation. The vulnerability. The powerlessness. The loss of a piece of myself.

Unfortunately, instigating a new rule against sexual harassment couldn’t erase the scar on my soul. Those ten minutes taught me to fear men, not just the few random individuals, but the world of men buoyed by its structures and supporters. Sure, I had manipulated my pain into some form of positive action (compromised as it was), but I never took the time to grieve the pain. Instead, I buried each and every one of my feelings, telling myself I was empowered. People (including me) appreciated the champion but didn’t care much for the girl. I don’t remember anyone asking if I was okay. I know I never posed the question.

Those same, dark emotions would come to haunt me in later years, when I stayed much too long in a psychologically abusive relationship and worked under multiple, controlling male bosses. In each episode, I reverted back to that scrawny 10th grader, only in greater degrees of anxiety and inward rot. My mother, and later my husband, would find me on the floor, curled up in agony, panicked as if I was under attack. Neither them nor I understood why the situation at hand was affecting me so. I had always seemed so strong, so able to tackle the hard times. I could turn lemons into lemonade.

Yet deep inside, I kept reliving the same horror, one tragedy building upon another. I was back in that classroom, isolated, without an advocate of my own. My editor kept patronizing me, and I had to keep pretending to like him. Only now, the stakes were higher, and I didn’t have a journalism teacher to ensure my voice made it onto the page.

Sexual assault isn’t about sex. It’s about power. Those boys in that classroom? They had the numbers, not to mention a teacher steeped in a “boys will be boys” philosophy. How did that editor keep himself out of my article? The reverence of his peers, who scapegoated the undesirables while maintaining their own place on the social hierarchy. What about that bad boyfriend, whose family gave him porn as a Christmas gift (right in front of me)? Hey, any red-blooded American male’s whipped if he sticks to only one woman. I was irrational to think otherwise. And those insecure bosses who wanted a “yes woman”—who belittled and threatened and undermined in a “I’m the boss, you’re a … bug” kind of way? Well, they had long-established organizations backing them, not to mention my job in their hands.

Besides, I was only being reactionary.

Sex—or any hint of it—didn’t have to exist. The helplessness feels the same. Today, I look back at that 10th grader and wish someone had validated her experience as life shaping, not merely a blip she should power through. I have to wonder, had that girl gone through all the steps—the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—maybe she would have seen the warning signs, stayed clear of that destructive relationship, chosen different jobs or at least quit before requiring years of therapy and recovery. Did ten minutes set her up for decades of heartache?

Americans love a superhero. Someone who can swoop in and save the day. Change the law. Elect the right president. Make things happen. This really isn’t much different from the “pull oneself up by your bootstraps” ideal. A woman is assaulted. She should talk. She should make a difference. As if the burden of changing the system rests upon her shoulders.

But this push—this pressure—negates her need to grieve. Our need to grieve. As I’m reading all the names of the women (and men) who are posting, #MeToo, I am thinking of their stories. Not just coverage of “the event,” but all the subsequent chapters flavored by trauma that, in the majority of cases, remains unspoken and never processed. Those boys, that editor—they never even touched me, yet I see and feel their paws all over my life, and I am still working toward my freedom. Imagine carrying the memory of rape.

Sad to say, I have other stories—some more terrifying, others I would only ever reveal to my closest confidants—but this tale, this tiny moment in a small town at some insignificant high school during the 1990s, encapsulates so much of what I’m observing today.

Each #MeToo—each person crying out against the Weinsteins and Trumps of the world—these are people in pain, which neither a firing nor an impeachment can assuage. Don’t get me wrong. We should fight for justice. We must demand integrity, especially of those in power. But the #MeToo confessors need something more. Listening ears. Permission to feel. Time to pick up all the pieces and heal.

R.R. Marsh is a writer and a mother currently living in Atlanta, Georgia.

Photo credit: Amparo Torres O. via a Creative Commons license.