If you read my blog post on Friday, then you know what today is: Today is the day to share more writing with you. 
This month is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and I wanted to share poem I wrote in my AP Literature class during my senior year. This was in response of support to another poem two students read aloud in class, Lindsey Hobart’s How to Tell a Rape Joke which you can take a look at here. A Lesson Learned is straight out of my poetry anthology (page 66) and even though I could probably quote every line of it in my sleep, here it is. I hope you like it.
A Lesson Learned
She’s insecure in her own skin,
though most people don’t really know why.
She worries about the scars on her body,
about how difficult they are to hide.
Because they define the mistakes of her past
and everything she thought herself to be:
a one-out-of-six, a statistic,
that most people cannot understand, do not see.
She is scared, the lonely kind of isolated,
the way her mind replays and goes back to
the moment it happened, what she did to deserve it.
Though in the end no one does. If only she knew
how to protect herself, how to stay safe.
How to know what to be, what she needed to say.
Or in the aftermath, how to put herself back together again,
that soon enough, she would somehow be okay.
But she will be stronger next time. She hopes and she prays
that maybe she will be guarded and able to show
the man who stole her dignity, her faith, and her pride
how damn good she has gotten at saying No.
PS. Since I forgot to mention it last week, I did a guest blog post a few weeks back for my publisher! You can take a look at it here, happy Monday.
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