April 2

"The Virginity Tree"
trigger warning: sexual assault

Prologue.
Andrea Gibson said to write the hardest poem.

One.
There are too many bruises in the word that does not belong between my legs.
It is four letters too many
which is to say it is four letters more than silence.
It is not a word that girls can give to other girls.

Two.
There is a tree that I can see from my room.
It’s heavy with shoes tied to its fingers as
reminders of what it means to be barefoot,
to be naked and touching for the first time.
It’s a tradition where I live:
you lose your shoes along with your virginity,
hang the pair in the tree.

Three.
Sometimes I imagine that I can erect fences around sections of my body,
miniature white picket spines designating parts of me as private property.
That is new; I used to imagine my body as a body.

Four.
There is a reason I remove my shoes every time I arrive somewhere new.
It’s the same reason I trust forests more than pickup lines.

Five.
My mother is a survivor,
a word she pronounces “victim”
and which she thinks pronounces her different,
even though the statistic is one in six.
One in six.

Six.
What is the meaning of the word legacy?

Seven.
I cannot bring myself to hang my sneakers –
the faded ones with rainbow laces and peeling heels –
in a tree so clamorous with happiness.
They would make terrible wind chimes.

Eight.
When the Womyn’s Center on my college campus strings the dirty laundry
of women’s shelter stories on a clothesline and calls it Take Back the Night art therapy
there is not a t-shirt there that fits me;
there is a man behind every curtain,
between every line.

Nine.
Her fingers knew the words crime,
No,
And Stop,
but she thinks her fingers can’t count.

Ten.
I called her “girlfriend” after that night,
called it a rite of passage
instead of wrong,
didn’t file a report because it took me three years
to even realize anything had been stolen
and not given freely.

Epilogue.
I still have not told my mother exactly how
precisely
I have filled her shoes.