By: Ashley Rae MᶜAtee
Last year, in late September, I finally spilled my guts.
Sixteen years after the Thing,
the incident
I never gave a name
but spoke of only
in short fits in the darkest corner
of any loud, thumping party
One college roommate
I never reported him
Two girls in a bathroom
The same thing happened to us
Three coworkers at happy hour
I signed the NDA, did you?
They heard pieces of my story
and I heard theirs.
We’d nod, eyes locked, a promise
to hold these truths
in the absence of justice
certain
there’d be no reckoning
no wrath to come down
and smite them where they stood
no plague on the houses where they ignored us
or tricked us
or suppressed our rejection
and pressed us
into couch-cushioned silence.
I spent half my life like this,
a human dam.
My body:
part walls,
warping and bending
groaning against the weight,
part water,
rushing to the valve
yearning for a leak in the night.
But last year, in late September, there was a thunderstorm.
The rain came down
on newspapers
held over heads, soaked
and stained with the running of ink.
The storm rolled through
lightning cracking,
slapping us out of our silence,
And the thunder—
oh, the thunder—
could shatter the sound
of a thousand secrets screamed
into the shaking of sky.
In a storm like that,
you can let the dam break
and nobody
will say it was your fault.
Ashley Rae MᶜAtee (she/her) is an emerging artist and poet living in Los Angeles, California. Her work explores the experience of healing from trauma and living under patriarchy, climate change and late capitalism. She studied at The Ohio State University and works as a Creative Community Professional.
"In September 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford told the US Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her thirty-six years earlier. Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony was hauntingly familiar to me and to thousands of other victims. In an effort to convince the members of judiciary committee (as well as our uncles, our colleagues, and strangers on the internet) of the credibility and humanity we saw in Dr. Blasey Ford, many of us opened up about personal traumas we had long kept secret. We believed there was power in our stories, and despite the continued dismantling of women’s rights, I still do. Sharing my story was the beginning of a healing journey that led me back to poetry after a long hiatus. I wrote “September” during a 2019 poetry workshop with fellow feminist writers in my Los Angeles community."
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