The Rape
By Melissa Cowley (President, '98-99, read at STD National Convention)

I am drunk on my own mind's evolution.
Something has laced the fluid surrounding
my brain. . .
making me dizzy,
upsetting the balance,
blurring my voice,
my personality.
Hate deadens what is me,
covers me
and I become
what I am not.

The night,
like a curtain,
hides what the world does to me. . .to us.
The sounds of the city--
cars, sirens, laughing, screaming, gunshots--
cover up calls for help,
the emphatic
"NO!"
that bleeds from my lips.
The world pushes into me,
deep inside,
violating everything that I am,
jamming me against the wall,
my skirt around my thighs,
my shirt torn, exposing
the left side of one too-white breast.

The virginity of innocence is stolen--
not given,
but taken--
in an alley
behind a dilapidated building
in a city somewhere,
anywhere,
everywhere.

The violence is real.
So real, in fact, that I cannot scrub the blood stains
from the insides of my thighs.
They remain an ever present reminder that the world keeps
taking everything that is
sacred.

But this war can't break my heart
and it will never crush my soul.
Yeah, that's right, you bastards!
Try to take from me what I know you cannot.
You may have taken my mind from me.
You may have used me as a hideous way
to get off--in a blind attempt to make a statement--
but you will never take me.
You will never plant your dirty seed;
my soil rejects all that you have to offer.
And I have no worries.
And I have no pain--I am numb.
And I have no tears.
And I have no dreams--my mind is not mine.
But I have the years...
the years in between, before, and those yet to come.
And those you cannot have,
however many times you come back to
break and enter and assault.
This is but a shell that you deface, desecrate.
What is beneath is holy.
It is clean;
I take communion at the church
burned down from last week's riots.
I ask forgiveness, but I will not
point the finger, lay the law,
write the story for the evening news.
And I will not blame myself. . .
or you--
a victim in your own right,
though I know not of what.

The world beats us everyday.
And we lie bleeding on the asphalt amidst
the rain
and the stench
and the rats
outside the back door of some cheap-ass, pimp-filled bar--
we lie exposed,
yet do not shiver,
we do not cry.

The broken, rain-softened boxes,
homes for the unfortunate,
form a baracade against the attack.
The abandoned,
frightened,
confused,
the children without homes--
they will survive beyond
this night.
They will get up and walk away from this. . .
like I will get up and walk away from this,
straighten the skirt,
cover the shoulder that bares
the indentations of the teeth of disease.
I'll push the hair from my tortured face so I can see,
so I can walk among the bodies left for dead,
in one red heel because the other was lost in the race to beat fate.
And I will wash the bruises clean
in a rust-filled shower in some cheap motel
and wipe the steam off of the mirror with my shaking hand,
the hand of time...
to glance at a face that is
no longer
mine,
no longer ours,
no longer a face at all:
a reminder of the abuse,
an answer to the prayer,
a gift for the accused,
a breath of newborn air.

If only I could suffer
for the masses
and punish the cruel.
But I am only one...
and yet,
I am all there is.