Claire's Prayers Live, Fight, and Survive

Claire’s Prayers Live, Fight, and Survive

Cannot speak or declare the painful

Consequences of my having been born a poor female

Don’t want mother to ever overhear

That makes me scared

Whenever he’s demanding my degradation

I am afraid to speak

With the school counselors about this

They will only call the school psychologists

They will defer to the campus police?

How do I know? Overheard a conversation

Right before an exam in English Literature

Covering the Red Badge of Courage

Cannot help but remember the Scarlett Letter too

It is right before Thanksgiving Holiday

American Literature!

Wish I could hear a fly buzzing by my bedside

Like Emily Dickinson’s reassurance about

Mendacity of Death (my anthem)

I don’t want to survive but the cutting of

My wrists, is just as painful as the unwanted caresses

And the disgusting proclamations of a man that

Has essentially surrendered to the place where he worships large sums of salary

To get into heaven quickly when he nears his end

Who is to account for these unlawful sins anyways?

Who is to be my voice?

I am fifteen and a half but my body acts completely dead

Because I am trapped

The local clinic where Rachel got her birth control and

Emily delivered and gave up for adoption a child

Conceived in just as much wrath as my body sustains

Continuously over the weekend

Rachel and Emily tell me I’m blessed to have only one aggressor

They each have serviced the animalistic desires of countless

Perpetrators, because of the lack of proper boundary systems in place

Due to the abject poverty and resulting circumstance

These conservatively disbelieving members of societies

Support in the statewide races for office those who promise to do away with

All resources that my brutally raped self and friends facing the same fate

Depend upon to keep us fit and free of pregnancies and STDs.

We admit to being sexually promiscuous for fear of causing our families

The embarrassments of incarceration and public humiliations

Although, if you find yourself on such a path,

Run away, run away, run away because the prolonging will only imprison

And disrupt your core to where you will have created your own hell on earth

Due to the men that prowl and scavenger for what is yours to decide

In an ordinary life

Hold your violators accountable if you’ve got the access to crisis lines

And know that there are public defenders willing to stand by your side

Just don’t close your eyes the way my friends from school and I decided.

An attacker forfeits his or her grounds when they isolate and surround

You in their clutches

They give up their previous identities for a life behind bars and not a single

Day progresses when I don’t wish I’d done the same as you will.

We will get through this, don’t lose hope! Live, fight, and survive!