Levigation

I’m doing different series as part of my dif/Fused Ancestry + suf/Fused Fiber project, each telling a different story. Here’s a series I need to add: 1. Norman, Oklahoma. 2. Norman, Oklahoma 3. Norman, Oklahoma. 4. Norman, Oklahoma. 5. Norman, Oklahoma. 6. I-35 north of Lake Texoma. 7. Memphis, Tennessee. 8. Atlanta, Georgia.

That’s the series that traces all the places I was sexually abused and sex trafficked as a child, raped as a teenager, and sexually assaulted as an adult. I need to collect soils from each of these locations and turn them into something else, anything other than the terror they strike in me to this day just thinking about them, especially that last location.

As I have written about extensively in my public essays since 2009, the location in Georgia is where a prominent member of the poetry community sexually assaulted me en route to my master of fine arts program. I want to incorporate his name and all the names of those who harmed me into this portion of my project because his name unwound my life—everything up to that point that I’d worked so hard for and overcome, even those other sites in the series: one through seven. He undid that healing, too, by making me talk about those abuses as he was assaulting me, by making me talk about the poetry in my first chapbook that dealt with those abuses.

Below is an excerpt from “The Writing Life: Parting Words,” an essay detailing that history that compiles all the essays I’ve shared publicly on the subject since 2009:

I’ve heard too many stories like mine to remain silent, including additional stories about this particular poet. I am still trying to find a path that will allow me to move forward in poetry. I am listening to the voices that have gone before me. I am being more careful than ever about who I associate with and who I trust. I am putting words to my experience and, regardless of the consequences, I am saying, This happened. This is wrong. It has to stop happening. This is about me, but it isn’t just about me. The issues in play in my story—power, manipulation, deceit, transgression, and the sexual assault that rose out of those issues—are central to other victims’ stories. My hope is to join the voices that are already calling for an end to the systematic subjugation, objectification, exploitation, and manipulation of women who want to be part of poetry. My hope is for stories like mine to be a thing of the past, not par for the course. I want all of this to end.

I cannot unwind anymore. I am still here. I am part of this earth, this land, my lands, all the lands that shaped me. The land never took anything from me. Boys and men did. Last night, I told my husband that I haven’t felt loved or cared for or connected to anyone since the poet sexually assaulted me. I feel like the nothing everything runs from, darker than dark, like what settles out after levigation. Heavy. Without pigment. Ugly. Coarse. Unusable. Waste.

For a long time, I thought his name didn’t matter because he’s one of many, part of a larger, systemic issue in poetry and in our society. That’s true. But what he did? I can name it, and I can name him. It’s important for me to do so as part of moving forward. Seventeen years is too long to leave part of myself trapped with him.