Alt Lit and Rape Culture - Further Reading - Poems on Rape Culture

I wish I had all the room in the world to publish every one of the moving, the grotesque, the angry, the sadly matter-of-fact poems and stories writers sent in for the alt lit and rape culture series. In lieu of that, and concluding the micro-series of poems on rape culture, here are some more poems, published in other platforms, for you to read. --SBB

From Two Objects and a Girl, by Staci R. Schoenfeld:

She’s all instinct and scent. Smells too much of her father. He’s been sniffing around. Her fur has come in and her ears grow long. She’s skittish. On guard.

From Crazy Daisies, by Sarah Certa:

. . . the voice
so big there’s no room
for you except in the corner, folded
like a balding swan
into your naked self, all the corners, all the
flowers to say I’m sorry, baby, I love you, they’re crazy
daisies, I got them
for us because we’re crazy
like that, he would say things
like that . . .

From The Rapist Joins AA, in the chapbook And I Shall Again Be Virtuous, by Natalie Eilbert:

Was the only night I ever drove drunk. The dark was not God’s back turned away.

Very drunk.

Drove slowly, imagined my car reeling home on a thick yellow string.
The machine I would carry also imagined this thick yellow string.

Parked delicately in a diner parking lot. Was worried an idle car
on the shoulder would spark interest. Was a very smart girl.

From In the Oven, by Jessica Reidy:

She said, Go on, tell the doctor. You hurt yourself doing cartwheels.

          The membrane glowed under surgical light.
          Mucinous fluid made a full moon, an oven lamp,
          that lit the room as I counted backwards:
I'll fuck you dead.

From It's a Guy Thing, by Jude Marr:

Bone withers in the aftermath.
I wipe my face on your sleeve
before you go.

From Someday, in the chapbook The Glass Sponge, by Jules Jacob:

You kicked the dog
and waited for my reaction,
predictably forgetting
I didn’t live for you anymore.

From The best part of sexual assault is how you can't pass the Bechdel Test anymore, by Sonya Vatomsky:

There aren't do-overs here. No summer school, no tutors. You're just a one trick pony for a while,
and your one trick is isolating yourself
from friends
from coworkers
from strangers, even
because nobody, literally nobody, wants to hear what you've got to say.

From The Way Mommy Bear Eats a Swam of Fire Ants, by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Choi Don Mee:

that there are only things that run away when they see me
like the enormous gray bear that sleeps while it walks
like the enormous black lace cloud fluttering above eyelids
like the dump truck leaking dribbles of oil in the middle of a desert
like the house with rotten stairs and six feet of dust collected in the ceiling
that there is no one except me standing all alone

Have something to say? Email comments, questions, responses, and links to relevant articles and literature elsewhere to: rapeculture.and.altlit [at] gmail [dot] com. For the original call for submissions, see here. To read all the essays and poems in the series, click here.