Tag: incest

• make oceans of me

  when history stops dictating how
  you feel in the present and now
  that’s when you’ve taken your life back.

  until then I’ll cry rivers into seas
  about all that was taken from me.

  September 19, 2025

  csa, flashbacks, grief, incest, life, love, mental-health, poetry, ptsd, rape, recovery, sexual assault, trauma, writing

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• Already a goner

  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.

  September 19, 2025

  csa, family, fiction, flashbacks, incest, life, love, mental-health, poetry, ptsd, rape, recovery, sexual assault, trauma, writing

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• I didn’t forget

  Can you really forget the feeling of safety
  when dad was the first man to rape me?
  They say my body forgot and now must relearn –
  like it’s as simple as choosing the upturn,
  like it’s just in my head, the embodied feeling of dread.
  As simple as riding a bike,
  insisting bodies can’t NOT know what it’s like
  to live more than just under fire;
  my activated nervous system was simply acquired.

  But I beg to differ,
  seeing as how I remain undelivered
  after all the remedies known to date
  proven to erase from complex bodies the word rape.
  No, it’s only your judgmental mouths
  that are most likely bound
  to remember what it felt like “before;”
  only they can live out the meaning of “restored.”

  But when you’re like me, a child
  by my daddy defiled,
  turned belly down,
  taught not to make a sound –
  easier when into my eyes
  he didn’t have to deny;
  but he did in fact try
  to drown out all my cries.
  So, tell me WHEN you claim safe entered?
  Because all I remember
  is a body dismembered
  by the ones who were meant
  to such a little body protect.

  Tell me when was THE moment
  my sense of safety left the present?
  Because sense only comes from first feeling
  love unconditional and unyielding.
  But all I know is the white flag
  of my mother, and the drag
  of my father’s hands, bending into submission
  the daughter – only loved on condition
  of my silence
  about unfathomable violence
  perpetrated by dad
  and mom denying it was really that bad.

  
  Tell me WHERE safe disappeared
  off to in the rear
  view mirror of my timeline?
  As benign
  as lost keys to a car –
  the kind that could’ve taken me far
  away from the two bedroom apartment
  where they laughed off all my sister’s and my torment.
  Tell me again HOW I’ve forgotten
  what it was like before all the rotten
  tastes and smells of my dad on top
  of me, telling him to stop
  to no avail.

  
  SHOW me now how my body failed
  to hold onto this MYTH of safe?
  When there was no safe before rape.

  September 19, 2025

  csa, family, flashbacks, incest, life, love, mental-health, poetry, ptsd, rape, recovery, sexual assault, trauma, writing

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