Author: Alice

Tree Frog

by Alice

A rape survivor’s moderately non-literal response
to a country’s monumentally unthinkable decision.

[And yeah, GOP Senators: I’m looking at you.]

* * * *

I would believe myself one of the Stoics, born again, if I could.

I would convince us both, if only I could believe, that the fire I have undergone tempered me like steel, rather than reduced me to bone chips and fragments of teeth. The debris of a mortuary’s kiln.

Red-eyed_Tree_Frog

Understand: I have long since abdicated belief in humanity’s innate goodness. Our impulses may tend always to sociability, to companions and to tribe. But—friends, a family, a troop of bullies, a rape gang, an army, a Senate… In the end, how is difference measured?

We learn to live with our hungers—to make peace with them—or we never learn to live. The trick is how to soften into one’s fear, whether of connection or abandonment. To sink, to collapse gently, yet still stand tall. I settle myself in the chair and reach for vulnerability. Try to let myself go, to let myself turn soft.

Soft like a paunch, my anger whispers back. Soft and bloated like a liver gone rotten with cirrhosis.

Even after transforming, the butterfly will fear what once made the caterpillar sick.

Continue reading “Tree Frog” →

do rape survivors dream of electric grad school?

by Alice

 

~a reading list I could have really used, back as a doctoral student~

electric grad school

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Constellation of Negative Life Outcomes Tied to Chronically-Misdiagnosed PTSD; Or: Why Write a Memoir When You Can Just Print Your Name on the Front of the DSM-5

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Pathological Overmodulation of Traumatic Memories, Associated Emotions, and Bodily Experiences in the Dissociative PTSD Patient: “I May Be Pathological, But Hey! At Least I’m Not Crazy” (a lit review)

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Schehera-who-now? 1,001 Nights of Managing a Narcissist’s Feelings in Order to Protect Your Own

Continue reading “do rape survivors dream of electric grad school?” →

Now turns the fallow earth in grief and also light.

by Alice

I am in the shower tonight.

For over an hour.

Again.

Seems I cannot shower enough during these dark, chilling days of autumn. For reasons I still find curious.

What reasons, you ask.

I could tell you. I could say that I like the heat and how the wet steam rises, or that I am washing off the stench of each day’s ever more rancid news, or that I have a new-found dedication to feminine conventions and shave my legs now twice daily, maybe my pubes too. In fact, I like these answers. I think I will tell you one of them. Or you just pick yourself a favorite, and pretend it’s what I said.

Pretend I did not tell you the truth: that I am still learning what it means to feel, in all the senses of the word and of the senses, and it is only when hot water hits me everywhere and all at once that I can remember the names of human emotion.

Most of the time I spend standing in the shower I am crying. Don’t read too much into that, though.

Showers are a liminal space, is all.

sleeper-near-the-shutters-1936.jpg!Large (2)

Continue reading “Now turns the fallow earth in grief and also light.” →

The Prophet Cassandra Arrives Late to the Dinner Table

by Alice

John_William_Waterhouse_-_The_Crystal_Ball

She slouches in, ever the surly adolescent;
slides like a grouch into her chair.
Her father, Priam, last king of the impregnable city
(Lo how the mighty walls of Troy forever fall)
is griping again his common complaints of shifty royal advisers
and tax collectors delinquent for the season.
Queen Hecuba purses her lips and frowns; passes down green beans
instead of the mashed potatoes her daughter asks for.
Heaving a weighty sigh, Cassandra tries to catch the glance
of a close-seated sibling, second eldest among her 50 brothers.
Fails, as expected. (Paris’s eyes already so full of Helen
whose beauty he has yet to see. Hands already so full
with the taste of her, he snatches in practice at scullery maids,
at the cook’s assistant; bears them off unwilling
into closets and dark corners—previews
of the world-ending snatch-and-run yet to come.)

The prophet sees in the distance her own snatching,
how this time next year she’ll be knocked up with the Sun God’s curse—
would-be curse, she corrects herself; disbelief comes as a burden
only to those unaccustomed to being disbelieved—
and laughs, distracted—a beat too soon,
interrupting her father’s joke before its punchline.
A minute later, redeems herself from his glare by laughing again,
this time at just the right moment in just the right way.
Under the table, she cups her ever-to-be-unpregnant belly
already swelling with a god’s seed,
already feeling the stories push and flutter beneath her skin.

~a.i.

[For more from the Myth & Fairy Tale Project.]

[Image: detail from The Crystal Ball by John William Waterhouse, public domain.]