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For Emily Doe: Brock Turner's Victim
She had to reach inside herself
and pull out pine needles. They stuck to
her inner thighs, where his fingers had first grazed,
trailing up. The lights in a police station
post-rape are jarring.
She looked through slitted eyes
and faced a dumpster staring back,
her mouth reeking of stale beer and blood.
The cool infinity of last night loops
into a tightly-knotted ribbon of forever,
a graveyard of bruised hips and phantom touches.
When the story stretched wider than
the picturesque Stanford campus, ivy-covered walls that distract from dark dumpsters,
a news anchor gave the viewers vital facts:
“Brock Turner’s freestyle time is one minute and thirty-nine seconds.”
No media could be bothered to discuss
the humiliation of getting a rape kit. No one bothered
to mention how helpless it is being
too drunk and resigned to walk,
naked,
body like a rag doll left rotting
with banana peels.
The world stepped over a raped girl
to defend a white boy, to bail out a monster,
all the while wondering where the blood on their shoes could have come from.
She could still hear the music,
a steady beat in spite of it all,
ear pressed soundly into the pavement.
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