From "Onset" by Kim Addonizio

it’s spring   

and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

March 8 (Content Note: SA & DV)

It is fitting and devastating-I-mean-fucking-soul-shattering that the poem the poetry magazine has decided to feature on International Women's Day is about rape. Because what will resonate with all women, they must have asked themselves, the ones reading this in England and in Africa and maybe a few in Asia or Eastern Europe and certainly much of our readership is from the USA--what do they all have in common and the answer is rape. The answer is the knowledge of what it is to feel violated and afraid. In varying increments, of course, and with varying levels of intersectionality. Let's send out a poem about rape and call it a day. Or maybe they were taking a stand. I don't assume their intentions. I read what is written and what was sent to me on International Women's Day, a day when I am meant to celebrate myself, a day when I am supposed to think about the grandness and greatness of women, and here I am thinking about rape, my own, my friends', my aunts', the women I've counseled afraid in the dark in the middle of the night, their breathy voices finding a few brief moments of sanctuary on anonymous phone lines whispering please don't hang up and me staying steady promising I won't. I'm here with you. I'm not going anywhere. But of course I was never with the them, not in the flesh, and it's the flesh we're talking about aren't we? and when they hung up the phone and turned he might be standing there, behind them with a lamp in his hand, ready to bash their head in.

And I'm thinking about how he understands none of it, husband, how he has no idea what a day like International Women's Day can mean, or what it might mean to find in my inbox a poem about rape on International Women's Day, or how that might cause my brain to start thinking about how many hands I have fought off me, the times I didn't, how much work and how long it has taken me to return to my body, how I still struggle to stay there, why I couldn't let him touch me sometimes, why sometimes fantasies feel safer and so I think about other people I look out the window at the falling snow, I stare at Wilson's cute little face until I feel like some semblance of myself and as I settle back into my body I feel once again that I am a woman, this is a woman's body, and some would equate that with rape, and at times I have equated that with rape, I have felt like nothing but raped, and also this body is soft and strong and flexible and resilient beyond fucking belief I mean she has been through a lot and here we are together, I walk through the world feeling strong, my body is stronger than I ever knew it could be, and there's a correlation, isn't there, because even though it's taken a while here I am, a woman, sitting with and in myself on International Women's Day, talking about rape and not defined by it, no never defined by it you asshole, thinking about all the women walking around feeling strong or feeling weak--it doesn't matter--sitting with and in themselves today, thinking about the grandness and the greatness of womankind.

From "The Architecture of a Love Poem" by Alexandra Peary

the heart had such a fancy elevator

              that it started to look like a bird cage