Parker Stillwater

I’m sick of apologizing for your behavior,
the way you walk up to strangers,
masking within you the danger
of a raper and his enabler.

Stop approaching my friends
or the folks you think could lend
compassion or hope for amends
with the daughter you condemn

in your insistent denial –
deafening silence for miles upon miles;
the way you won’t refute
or accept well-earned rebuke

for the things he did under your nose,
believing now the lies he’s composed,
simply because you don’t dare
to admit you never really cared

that your daughters weren’t safe
from the same terrors you braved.
Rather, your first priority
remains to him – all your loyalty –

because unfortunately for you
and for her and me too,
you are one of the ones
who failed to plunge

into your own depths of pain
before repeating the past again.
Instead, trusting not in instinct, but false promise
that he’s not interested in incest.

But, you know what I know
in that place down below –
the raper inside him made you ask
because he reminded you of your past.

Yes, we both know that our sixth sense,
refined by years surviving violence,
tells us when we’re too close
to those

capable of ravaging small
bodies. After all,
we know better than most
that rapers take their time to encroach.

I’m convinced you only begged
for what should be able to remain unsaid
because you knew he was just like
the men who made surviving your plight.

So I’m asking- No! To you, I’m telling:
it would be more compelling
to believe that you miss your daughter
if you stopped protecting her father –

the man you so regrettably chose
to stay with despite all of the blows
he landed on your body and mine;
Damage that withstands test of time.

See, I’m done asking and requesting;
in my family of origin, no longer investing;
because after more than forty years,
I’m done crying wasted tears

on a mother who at the end of every day
lies next to my raper, and in this way,
chooses denial over integrity and honor.
Before I was born, I was already a goner,

having you as my mother, who at the end
refuses to believe or condemn
that she was complicit
in my elicit
upbringing of incest.