poems of emma glitch, old and new

[emma glitch]

One Woman's Rape

Rape is when your father commits suicide and it's not even the worst thing that happens that week.

Rape is when your roommate's boyfriend leaves your room with your skin and your blood under his fingernails and calls it comforting you for your loss.

Rape is when your roommate stops you from calling the police because her boyfriend's father will have you charged with prostitution.

Rape is when the gyn gives you one course of gentian violet and when you come back still in pain refuses to do a second pelvic because you are "too young to have vaginitis" and you are too young to know what vaginitis is.

Rape is when the doctor tells your mom to lock you up in the psych ward because everybody knows you can't be raped because your father just committed suicide.

Rape is when the shrink crams you so full of thorazine that he tells your mom that it's a good thing she got you in because now you're getting worse.

Rape is when he crammed you so full of thorazine that he thinks you're comatose when actually you're entombed in your body, seeing, hearing, unable to speak.

Rape is when you get let out on an overnight pass and your mom lets your friends take you to a party and they sit there laughing while a college buddy molests you and they think they're safe.

Rape is when you find out that you are so damaged inside you'll never go full term with a pregnancy, but they don't tell you you can still get pregnant.

Rape is when you refuse the first abortion but the doctor refuses to let you die.

Rape is when you realize that if you hadn't fled your home state you would have been left to die of that pregnancy.

Rape is when you refuse the second abortion unless they tie your tubes so you never have to go through the evaluation ever again.

Rape is when you watch your mother-in-law destroy your husband with her anger over your perceived willful refusal to give her grandchildren.

Rape is settling for a man who didn't want children, but wouldn't tell his mother so.

Rape is when you spend the rest of your life horrified at the thoughts of vengeance that flood your brain.

Rape is when you begin to feel a desire to carry them out.

Rape is when your mom cries for her part in your wrongful psych treatment.

Rape is when you forgive her over and over and over but she wants you to lie and say it never happened.

Rape is when she kicks you out of her life because she needs to believe rape never touched her life.

Rape is when you let her because your need to be believed is greater than your need to be loved.

Rape is when she talks to you again as you're recovering from cancer.

Rape is when you see her again as she's dying from hers.

Rape is the theft of your mother's love.

Rape is the fear of the locked ward.

Rape is theft of person, theft of health, theft of sanity, theft of love, caring, ability to trust.

Rape is all this and a whole lot tragic more.

This is my rape. Your rape may vary.

Emma Glitch, 6-15-2014

[RJDiogenes]

emma.

I'm sorry. I wish I could take this all away from you. I wish I could do something. You're so nice and you deserve so much better than this. Now I know why you didn't want to post this on your blog. I wanted to say that I hope posting it here and sharing it with us helps, but I know that would be a silly and vain hope. But I do hope that ReNext and all of us here are something nice in your life, because I want you to have nice things in your life and I want this place to be one of them.

[emma glitch]

Not a silly and vain hope at all, RJ.

[RJDiogenes]

That's good. I like being hopeful.

[Madeliaette]

I like how the poem stretches the mind and forces it to consider the whole 'aftermath too' of rape rather than viewing it as an individual event that can be dropped into the past and forgotton - what I dont like is that such a horrific, destructive ordeal happened to you.... Emma....

[emma glitch]

Thanks, Maddie! That's exactly what I realized I was doing when I got to the rather be believed than loved part. Rape is a theft, and leaves a lifelong impact.

Last night at the Veterans Writing Retreat follow up, I shared my poem with one of the mentors. Saul Turteltaub is a tv comedy writer, and he was there to tell us what makes a good comedy writer. He was sitting next to me, so when it was my turn to give my update on what I was working on (my memoir) and I received much praise for my authentic voice, strong emotional content, and obviously personal interest in my material (memoirs are good for that), Saul quietly asked me a question about where something I'd said had come from. I could feel the weird look on my face, and he could see it, so I pulled out the poem, handed it to him, he read it, and when he handed it back, he gave me an amazing affirmation. It was a look of deep understanding, and he quietly said, I won't ask again. He got it! He totally got it!

Though the hassle with the state over taxes I don't owe is taxing my patience and stealing my writing time, I find myself snatching moments to write something for later. Yesterday in Whole Foods I stopped in an aisle, whipped out a pen and yellow pad, wrote for a good five minutes.

oops, his name is Saul Turteltaub, not Turtelbaum. AFAIK turtles have doves, not trees!

[RJDiogenes]

It was a look of deep understanding, and he quietly said, I won't ask again. He got it! He totally got it!

Yesterday in Whole Foods I stopped in an aisle, whipped out a pen and yellow pad, wrote for a good five minutes.

I love that.

[emma glitch]

This will tell you how overwrought I've been over sharing this, I just came here to post it, having forgotten I already had.

Responses have included an amazing affirmation from my favorite mentor, a writer who shared her response to rape with us and who I gave a copy to last month, the effort to stop me from reading the poem in group, my clinician's response, and Saul Turteltaub's understanding.

Favorite mentor agreed that this is my authentic voice, and wrote "honest, poetic, written in direct and admirably clear language."

Writer wanted to know how long it took me to write it, and when I said it poured out of me in about 15 minutes, was not surprised. We discussed the part about needing to be believed more than loved.

She and I discussed this in the ladies room, in the presence of the woman who had told me that just because I wrote something didn't mean that anybody had to read it (or, more to the point, listen to me read it) and who had stunned me with her assumption that she would not want to hear it. It is very telling that while I avoid speaking to her, she avoids speaking to me as well. Another woman in the group has made a point to affirm me during every meeting, and I appreciate that very much.

My clinician is impressed. It is a sign of my dealing with it. She agrees that it is not all misery, but has light touches of very dark humor, which I now understand is a very good thing. I wrote this poem the weekend before the second weekly VWR follow up last June, when Saul Turteltaub told us that a good comedy writer must be able to see humor in every aspect of human life. After something I said (he was sitting next to me) he quietly asked me where it had come from, and I pulled out the poem and handed it to him. He got it. And what I got was the knowledge that it's okay to find something horrifying funny, and that helped me let go of the shame.

And I don't mean the shame of being raped, since as far as I'm concerned, that belongs to the rapist, not the victim, I mean the shame of finding parts of the total experience funny. For instance, years later I did a mental head slap and realized that when my roommate made me confront him and he taunted, "You wanted it," my response should have been, "Yeah, but not with you!"

One reason that writing is therapeutic is that you can put stuff down in print that you can't say out loud, and maybe then you'll be able to say it out loud. I've been taking baby steps for 46 and a half years, but looking back they appear to be giant strides. And that makes me happy.

[RJDiogenes]

What is that woman doing in a writers' group if she doesn't want to hear what people write? She shouldn't even be there.

Yeah, there's no reason to feel guilty about finding humor in dark situations. It's very healthy. It's a sign of the resiliency and flexibility of the human mind. Neither laughing nor crying can change the past, so why not laugh? There are enough external factors to make us miserable without adding internal factors.

[emma glitch]

What is that woman doing in a writers' group if she doesn't want to hear what people write? She shouldn't even be there.

I don't think it's that she doesn't want to hear what people write, so much as what I write. This took me completely by surprise because I thought that she and I were bonding.

Yeah, there's no reason to feel guilty about finding humor in dark situations. It's very healthy. It's a sign of the resiliency and flexibility of the human mind. Neither laughing nor crying can change the past, so why not laugh? There are enough external factors to make us miserable without adding internal factors.

Amen to that!

[RJDiogenes]

Maybe it exceeded her comfort level. Or touched a nerve.

[emma glitch]

And it gets even funnier! She has posted to fb a video, which I mean to watch as soon as Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is over, titled We Are All One - An Inspiring Short Film To Watch. And what she posted with it begins with:

My heart soars with this knowledge I've known all my life. My heart soars to hear & see this in a format that we can SHARE for those who may not have been as blessed as I to feel this even as a small child. We can come together and re~solve our differences....

I'm considering my options for humorous use of this information.

[RJDiogenes]

It's kind of sad that someone would post a nice video like that, and yet be so mean to a fellow writer. I wonder what her problem is.

[emma glitch]

I guess her heart crash lands for some of us.

[RJDiogenes]

Indeed. There must be something going on with her. The last few weeks I've been thinking a lot about one of our policyholders at work. I first heard about her when they put me on the escalated issues team. She has become kind of a legend as a troublesome member. She yells at people, insults them, swears at them, makes unreasonable demands, and has a tendency to hang up and call back if she's not instantly satisfied. After I was on the team for a few days, my number came up and I got her (basically, she just asks for a supervisor right off the bat when she calls, which gets her switched to my team). Sure enough, she was angry and abusive and impatient and asked for something that we don't normally do as one of our services. No problem. I'm pretty diplomatic and good at handling troublesome clients, because they don't upset me and I really want to help them. So I was able to calm her down a bit, which gave me the opportunity to try to get the information she asked, even though we don't have it. After a few seconds, I realized that when she wasn't yelling and swearing, she was softly crying to herself. Then I realized that she was using a professional service to help her make phone calls and take notes. And one of the things she was asking for was information on neurologists who specialize in multiple sclerosis. Then I noticed her age. I realized that she was angry because she's an older woman with advanced multiple sclerosis who can't even make a phone call on her own and she is scared to death. This phone call has been haunting me ever since and it's really made me dwell on the fact that people are just like any other animal: If they bark at you it's because they're hurt or scared. I knew this all along, of course, but talking to this woman really touched me in a way that's made me think about it constantly ever since. I'll bet it's the same thing with this woman. She's got some internal injury that she's hiding and would probably never admit to.