When Women Drink We Love

By Julia Tagliere

 

Why is it that when women drink we love
We melt at your gentle insistence
and praise your strong hands
We shed our full-body armor
and open our honeyed limbs
We forget
When women drink we love
We do not, generally, shove bottles into your rectums
or try to force your flaccid penises inside of us
as you lie on the asphalt beside a dumpster
When we drink
we do not, normally, bloody your boxer briefs
or spray our sticky souvenirs into your hair
as your mouths scream against our hands
When we drink
we do not, usually, invite friends to watch, join in, and Snap
or laugh while our bladders empty onto your faces
as you curl into the tiniest balls of garbage human beings can become
When women drink we love
When women drink we forget
And how that forgotten fear fails us
when your insistence becomes force
when your hands become fists
when your love becomes hate
When women drink, we love
and are somehow condemned
When you drink, you hate
and are somehow pardoned
Why is that
Why is that

 


Julia Tagliere’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Writer, The Bookends Review, Potomac Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Washington Independent Review of Books, SmokeLong Quarterly, various anthologies, and the juried photography and prose collection, Love + Lust. Winner of the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition for Best Short Story and the 2017 Writers Center Undiscovered Voices Fellowship, Julia recently completed her M.A. in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. She serves as an editor with The Baltimore Review and is currently working on her next novel, The Day the Music Didn’t Die. Follow her at justscribbling.com.

Photo by Kevin Butz on Unsplash.

Life Is Glass

By Phyllis Klein

 

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily,
and so do dreams and hearts.”      – Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

 

Breaking: Buzz of a bone fractured, burst of a bowl hitting the floor,
boom of a heart splitting. Please like me. A dream as it shatters.
Please think I’m good. Whistle of a word as it severs from itself into the air.
Of a scream demolished.

Moments of breaking: Hand over the mouth, gagging, pushed into a room, door locked from
the inside. Parties, drinking. Why did I do that? The seconds it takes to get
lost. Smash of consciousness as it disappears. Disillusion’s waking
croak. Where are my clothes? Fragmentation into terror.

How it happens: Remembering, forgetting. Was I drugged?
After school, at a party, pungency of impact, taste without
permission. No proof. In the sacristy, in a back seat, a hotel
or a bedroom, did it happen?

Breaking: Dust of collision, whiff of dreams burning, nightmares strike,
cymbals snarl in the brain. I’m repulsive. Floating above it
all in a disappeared body.

Why she didn’t tell: Pretend. It didn’t happen.
No one will swallow it. He threatened, laughed, was stronger, bigger.
It’s my fault. They won’t believe me. Pretend. Have to see him sneer.
Hide it.

What happens next: Cracks. Panic, a plane taking off in the gut.
Armor, as involuntary as neurons saying run, but all there is is a
wall. Looking ok, nobody knows. Get over it. What is PTSD? The thing
that won’t leave, the image, the smell, the taste that’s a plague.

The crush of shame. Lack of sleep. When is it over?
Feeling it, numbing it. Not understanding yet that greatness
comes from damage.

 


Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Portside, Sweet: A Literary Confection, 3Elements, The Poetry Hotel, I-70, and the Minnesota Review. She was a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forche Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing poetry as artistic dialogue—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash.

 

Just the Facts, Please

By Caroline Taylor

 

It’s okay if you don’t recognize the make or model of the car that hit you. It’s okay if you can’t be sure it was gray or silver, and no one expects you to recall the license plate details. After all, they came out of nowhere. Your car is totaled, and you have a broken arm. Of course, you didn’t notice anything about the person driving the car that hit you. You were a victim, and the perpetrator will be brought to justice with very little concern for the damage it might do to their reputation.

You’ll be understood if you can’t be sure the mugger or school shooter had a shotgun or an automatic rifle or had blue eyes or brown or if their hoodie was navy or black or if they were young or old. You’re just lucky to be a survivor. Everyone gets that. And hardly anyone cares what pain or humiliation the ensuing publicity might cause the perpetrator, provided they survived.

But if you’re the victim of a sexual assault, you don’t have a chance in hell of being believed unless you can recall exactly when it happened (to the second, if possible) and where it happened (address, room number, zip code), including if you were raped on the floor of the living room, in a bedroom (which bedroom?), or elsewhere like, for example, an office or a bar or a deserted warehouse (what were you doing there?). If the attack happened outside, you must recall whether it was in a park, in a car, or in an alley (what were you doing there?). If you were assaulted in a rural area, it is paramount that you remember the exact phase of the moon, whether it was cloudy or rainy or snowy, and whether any animals you observed or heard were cattle, sheep, horses, wolves, or coyotes. No one will sympathize if you cannot describe the biota—corn field, wheat field, tree farm, pasture, woods, desert—and, if woods, whether the trees were conifers or deciduous or a mix, or, if desert, whether the cacti were epiphytic or globular or a mix.

Unless you were blindfolded, you will be expected to recall the full name and physical description of the perpetrator, as well as any potential witnesses and whether they (or you) were inebriated. If your inebriation incapacitated you because it was a roofie, you will be accused of poor judgment. You will be required to describe the clothes you were wearing. You must recall what the perpetrator and any witnesses said, and when they said it. You will need to provide their addresses, both physical and online, and phone numbers.

If you cannot recall these details or failed to videotape the attack, you will be suspected of having a faulty memory or making a false report for ulterior motives. (Of course, if you did happen to record the attack, that fact could also be used to suggest the assault was a setup.)

Not everyone understands that you are a victim of a sexual assault. Many people persist in believing you must have asked for it. Sometimes, especially when the stakes are high, you could remember every detail and have all the facts and contact details for more than one credible, corroborating witness, and still be blamed for your role in sullying the reputation of the person who attacked you. Women, and more recently young Catholics of either sex, know that this double standard applies today, as it has for millennia. Unfortunately, those with an outsized sense of entitlement and their own ulterior motives know this, too.

 


Caroline Taylor is the author of five mysteries and one short story collection. Visit her at www.carolinestories.com.

Image by pixel2013 from Pixabay.

I Only Smile at Dogs

By Lizz Schumer

 

Femme is an act of war
Living in this body performance art
Like daring to walk down the street.

(Does my topknot offend you?)

Keeping men’s words out of my head
(Hey baby, smile for me)
To make room for my own.

Lipstick and lace body-armored
My skin is a weapon in your country.
It belonged to all of us until a hostile takeover
Long before any of us was born
Made it unsafe to live without a Y chromosome
In these streets.

What are you so afraid of?

My pheromones give you the wrong idea.
The chemicals I’m wearing in my too-sexy bloodstream
interact with your masculine fragility
And make it ok for you to rape me

Just like that.

I didn’t sign up for the 321,500th regiment
But here we are
An army of one in six
With only our closed legs to protect us.

And you say I’m angry
Like that’s my crime.
Not my thousand-year stare that still doesn’t see equality
Not my pencil legs or grapefruit tits or thigh gap or back fat or asking for it just by virtue of

Being
Here.

I apologize before I act, then after
Because headphones aren’t a barrier you respect

Like my skin
Like my lack of enthusiastic consent
Like my autonomy

Because I don’t exist to you except as a border to be breached
In a conflict my body drafted me into
As a prisoner before we began.

 


Lizz Schumer is a pansexual, disabled, cisgender white woman (pronouns: she/her) living and working in Astoria, NY. She writes primarily on the themes of living in a body in the world and how our physicality—including the way human brains process surroundings and society—affects experiences. She writes that “I Only Smile at Dogs” grapples with feeling unsafe as a cisgender femme in a patriarchal society. It examines the responsibility placed on female-identifying persons, to “protect” themselves against men, and the expectations society has them because of the bodies they inhabit. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Salon.com, Self.com, Greatist.com, Wordgathering, Breath & Shadow, Minerva Rising, Manifest-Station, and others. She can be found online at www.lizzschumer.com, facebook.com/authorlizzschumer, and on twitter @eschumer.

Photo credit: Gigi Ibrahim via a Creative Commons license.