A few months before she died, a dear friend of mine, a poet, called me and apologized over and over and over for how she treated me in 2015, which was to stop communicating with me over the issue with the poet who harmed me. We’d been close. Very close. I’d reached out to her several times in 2015 and thereafter with no response. I didn’t hear anything from her for seven years.

She believed me, she explained as she cried, but she didn’t know what to do. She was just so sorry. She needed me to know that.

But she also asked why I still cared, so many years later, about what happened. Couldn’t I just let it go, she asked. Turns out that question wasn’t for me. It was for her. A few weeks before she died, she called me and told me her father had sexually abused her. We talked for hours. These things aren’t ones that can be let go. They live in our bodies and make their way into our consciousness, sometimes decades later. They have to be seen and recognized and processed, not let go the way you might brush off an insensitive comment or a minor annoyance.

What I learned from my friend is that sometimes we push others away who have experienced what we can’t let into our consciousness, what we can’t deal with, at least not yet. It can be impossible to face what’s happened to others when we can’t face that it’s also happened to us. The reason for the pushing away may not even be in our awareness. What happened may be stuffed so far down that we don’t know what happened, let alone why we’re behaving the way we’re behaving. We’re just behaving. We may deride the person we’re shunning. We may call them weak or use inappropriate labels to describe them. We may call them crazy, bringing us into superficial alignment with those who do harm and call their victims crazy.

As my friend came to the end of her life, she was able to bring what happened with her father into her consciousness. Or maybe she just wasn’t unable to continue avoiding what she’d been avoiding for decades. But that was just the beginning of the work. When the thing goes from the body into the mind, or more accurately into a shared body/mind existence, that’s only the beginning of healing. My friend didn’t make it past the beginning. But I hold her story and her in my heart. She’s in my poems, always.

She’s the only person who’s ever apologized to me for their part in what unfolded in 2015. And she wasn’t even spearheading anything. She was just caught up in the battle, as were many folks, including victims like me who were unable to speak as we were overrun by those attacking us and those purporting to support us alike.

—

Glass
— for Kelly

Today I saw a starling try to fly
into a closed window as if it knew

the pane was a way out, not a way
through. You feel like that, too,

sometimes, as do I, traumas lining
our pockets and us wondering

at the weight we bear, our desire
to find a body of water deep

enough to cover us like a sheet
of glass. I’ve stood on that shore,

or should I say sore, open wound?
Maybe I should say wound, the verb,

as in how many years have we
wound and unwound like a thousand

pulsating variable stars, held each
trauma-stone to the light and tried

to feed it little snails, as if we could
nourish the pain away or nurture it

into something that might walk
beside us rather than having to be

carried or dragged? We are turning
rocks into sky, you and I, our feathers

oiled, our backs to the sun. We are song-
birds, too. Everyone seems to forget that.

—

“Glass” first appeared in Anti-Heroine Chic.