don't touch me: a sexual assault in 4 parts

1. 

i don’t remember what

i was wearing the day

i was sexually assaulted

and if small mercies exist,

sure that’s one of them?

i wish i didn’t remember

anything at all

like the smell of beer on

the two women’s breaths

or how it felt to

be forcefully trapped between

their bodies as they ground

down onto my 17 year old skin

not one other person

in that veritable sea of

drunk adults heard my

cries begging them to

stop, please stop

stop, i’m a minor

stop, you’re hurting me

and then to be called

a liar by the first person

i ever told

broke me even more

and i’ve got the scars

to prove it

like maybe if i

cut deep enough i

could scrape out what

left me feeling dirty

and unclean and used up

2.

and the second person

i so foolishly told

sure that she of all people

would help me

called me a liar, too

though in a more drawn out way

“you’re being dramatic,

making this into something it’s not,

and you need to forgive them”

i sometimes wonder that

if i were still pretending to

be a girl

would people have believed me,

or would it have been worse?

would the sexual assault

have become less letters,

even though that “can’t

happen to men”?

3. 

i don’t have answers

to those questions

but what i do know is how

murky the meaning of an

employer groping me while

neither of us is on the clock

truly is

to me, an action like that

like this grown man

old enough to be my father

groping my chest

falls into a gray area between

sexual assault and sexual harassment

how dare he

violate me like that

with zero disregard for

my consent and bodily autonomy

and the irony of being called

a liar for being sexually assaulted

by the wife of the man

who sexually harassed me

years later is not lost on me

nor is it appreciated

adding yet more weight

to this trauma until me

knees buckle and my

fingers once again itch

for the blade

4.

i envy those of you that

have forgotten this trauma

of mine

and how easily you absolved

yourselves of any guilt for

looking into my flushed and

tear-stained face and

calling me a liar

i want to know how you

sleep at night

because i sure

as hell don’t