652: The Favorite
Warning: This poem discusses rape.
“The Favorite”
Alison Townsend
You know you’re not supposed to have favorites
but can’t help liking most this girl
with auburn hair, and the name of your best
friend in high school, the one who recites
swathes of Emily Dickinson aloud, standing out
like a shining blade among the bored, pasty faces
in Freshman English, announcing that she
wants to write her research essay on love,
eighteen after all, despite her way with language.
You don’t know yet you’ll be her favorite too,
happy whenever you see her name on your roster,
as you watch her hammer a house of words together,
board by shining board, turning your slightest
suggestions into windows and doors-apertures
that could open on almost anything. And do,
the day she comes to your office, an essay
cradled in her arms for you to read before
class-the one things (she tells you)
she is afraid to write. Though she has
written it, fighting her way back inside
her fourteen-year-old self so convincingly
you can feel lilies blooming inside her skin
and the way her eyelids flutter, taste Juicy
Fruit, smell the talcumed longing that pulls
her to the carnival that night with her best friend,
flat-bellied and sparkling, looking for the kind
of boys she doesn’t even know to watch out for.
But this is where things jumble and blur, her story
suddenly yours, the twinkling Ferris wheel
a circle of boys with joints you and your friend-
the one with your student’s name-
found yourself trapped inside one New Year’s
decades ago, the memory pushed down the way
those boys pushed the two of you from one
to another, the Beatles’ “Come Together” loud
in the back of your head. As your student flirts
down the midway, through the hot scent of cotton
candy and popcorn, everything about her unbearably
young, from the small, hard apples of her knees
to the way her braces cage the sweet red
of her mouth. To the moment you know is ahead
when the boy she shunned a few steps back grabs
her arm, then yanks her under a tent flap,
the way a boy pulled you under the stairs
at that basement party. Pushing her down the way
that boy pushed you, his friend there, too, and another,
then more, then you fighting free, and somehow
your girlfriend underneath them all while you
tried to think how to make it end, Come together,
right now playing over and over. Or is it
that carnival honky-tonk, sweat and beer and
sawdust and dope, the short skirt pushed up,
the boys’ movements jerky and sharp?
Because you got away didn’t you, hitch-
hiking home in the dark with your friend,
who couldn’t talk about what happened?
And they didn’t-your friend, and your student
who was held down, the secret of it clamped
deep inside like a terrible pearl. Until this week
when she sat in her dorm and typed
what you read now aloud. So she can see how clear-
sightedly she reaches back and puts her arm
around that girl, washing her off, throwing
the torn skirt out. So she can know
it was not her fault, the most beautiful
room in her whole house built from the ugliest
mud, terror a blow vowel that kisses
the hurt. As you read back to her
what she has written, thinking of your lost
and silent friend, the iodine-sting
of your student’s words burning,
healing, alive in your mouth.
On an infuriating note, outside in the main plaza of my university, there is a man who calls himself a Christian who is preaching (which is more of saying everyone is hell-bound except for himself, because he is sinless). He went on about how all women are going to hell because they're all whores, and then he said that all women, in their hearts, desire to be raped in order to satisfy their lustful urges. How on earth can he believe that? How can he honestly think that his god wants him to condemn all women and speak lies like he does?