Your Rescue
There was no other option but forget.
No one wanted to hear the clichéd account:
Girl has too much to drink. Girl shouldn’t
have gone to the party. Girl was wearing
a toga? And even if you could find someone
to believe, you knew whose side they would
take. So, you carry the secret. For decades.
And then one summer, the one where you
checked yourself into a “fat camp” to be all
your husband wanted you to be, you drag
your sore exhausted body to listen to a woman
share her story. She is a poet. You haven’t
heard poetry recited aloud since middle school.
Her urban delivery, nothing like you remember.
Her story, nothing like your own. Still, she
laid out before you a welcome mat, urging you
to walk through a new door. Stepping across
that threshold, you found yourself and learned
the language of letting go.
Judge’s comments:
This poem about sexual assault covers a great deal of emotional territory in a concise space. Another intimate poem, we are let in to the speaker’s state of mind about the assault and how, like so many women, she felt she could not to step forward. The ugly truth is all women have been this woman or love someone who was. And the poem gives us hope because the speaker herself, who still had a difficult relationship with her body, discovers, after checking herself into “fat camp,” poetry as a path toward healing.
Shawn Aveningo-Sanders
Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. Author of What She Was Wearing, she’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.