My writing instructor called what happened rape, so now, this evening
By Meg LeDuc
I’m weighting myself with waffles and a quarter-milligram of Klonapin, as my head drifts, spacey, the space cadet, that’s what my brothers once called me, so I think, Storm Troopers in Star Wars, how they look like Space Commandos, and Donald Trump wants to create an elite Space Force, and I dream about the former president and rape, but my male therapist said, this is perfectly normal, it’s on the news, and women, and men, all over the United States dream rape-dreams as Big-Yellow-Man ascends, the Bird, the Sunbird, the Bird-Flower—no, a thousand times, no, Sunbird sounds like Sesame Street and doldrums and dandelions, not Space Force and cadets at West Point, tales of immigrants as looters and destroyers and rapists, there, I said it, rapists, only it is the immigrants I have labeled the rapists, the earth-skinned people, with hair like peony buds spent and drenched by rain, and we are so very, very tired, they say, of these words, and I say, through the green fuse drives the flower, and I am just as guilty of generalization as the man who pisses in golden toilets, and I’m afraid, and will my ability/lack of ability to define my own terms for what has been done to my body-mind—this body/mind, this unraveling body, mind, mindless, mind substance yielding to membrane, cocaine, cacao, coffee, caffeine, come hither and yon—come undone in a new dictatorship, and my tabby cat is curled up on my nut-brown desk, wooden membrane scarred with knives, perhaps, steely, and razors, or just penknives and pens, and I’m honky-tonked in this spreading golden light, piss-poor light, and I want to say that I know what rape means, but I don’t, I truly don’t, though I think it has to do with pig-greased men with brass-breasted Slovenian brides who ride escalators to the bottom of moonlit-explosions kaleidoscope-canyons to call grassy hills lonely in the far forest battlefields—they are taking our women and girls, these earth-toned races—and surely the flora and fauna cry, and rape is being done as Kapok and Amazon Magnolia burn, and into this burdened air comes the stench like un-mothering the fawn like skinning the bison like beheading the sand-billed crane, then picking our teeth with its bones, and what won’t we eat, we the people, so we breathe their feathers into the fawning atmosphere until the ripe seed is the rapeseed is the rape of the lock, so I can lock all my doors, all the doors of my mind, but these warring vapors sift in underneath the doors in the sills beneath the walls through the floorboards, burdening my pores, nothing like the ocean nothing like the breeze that should unlock my most wondrous parts—only for it, will I return—only for it, will I rest upon the earth.
Meg LeDuc's personal essays and flash nonfiction have appeared in Mount Hope Magazine, Brevity, Atticus Review, and New Delta Review, and an essay is forthcoming from Third Coast Magazine. Another essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Please visit www.megleduc.com.