Poem: A Sleeping Bag Can Be A Body Bag. #StopKavanaugh

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me.”

– Christine Blasey Ford

TW: Sexual assault

I wrote this poem today about my sexual assault when I was 18 on a college camping reforestation trip. The events of the Supreme Court nomination process, the behaviour of a potential Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh has triggered me a lot, and I feel it’s so important to remind people how soul crushing these acts are.  How much I feared I might die in the desert.  How long this has haunted me.

You can listen to my reading of the poem, or read it yourself below.

Contents can be a corpse, a blow up doll

small neck you throttle without remorse.

Some sleeping skeleton you find to fall

atop inside a darkness, desert.  Force

your way — “so wet” you say as if it seems

okay despite the crying, desperate

midnight, choked supplications of something

you dragged across the dirt, asleep — you shake

to open, hurt them maybe bury with

an animal, striped tiger, different

so-far-away-in-Texas boy’s last gift

to someone sent to Utah — wed, repent.

A feminist, three new female friends said,

and what’s below you wonders am I dead?