Audrey Lee | My mother says I should write about Brett Kavanaugh & I take a breath and tell her:

Audrey Lee is a writer and student from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who attends Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she is earning her B.A. in creative writing and American studies. Her work has been featured in The Sierra Nevada Review, DIALOGIST, The Indiana Review, and Teen Vogue.

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Also by Audrey Lee: O Philadelphia Insecticide Poems The Mariana Trench Isn’t Dark Enough

June 2019

Audrey Lee

My mother says I should write about Brett Kavanaugh & I take a breath and tell her:

i do not owe him anything. i do not owe him my words, my time & the body that creates those things & i do not owe him my body & i do not owe my body to anyone. mother, you taught me this when i was young & supple skinned, unscarred & virgin before i owed anyone, anything. & i never did. mother, please chide me for my youth & baby fat & how i am raped & cannot understand how this is my fault & how i am touched & how i do not owe anyone my touch where i shouldn’t. & how i am ruining a man, how i am ruining a man’s life & how this is because i am a woman & have all the power to do so. i do not owe anyone my time & ruin their life in doing so. mother, i do not want to write about how my power & my power in my words & time & body, screamed behind a hand clapped over my mouth & it tells me to shut up & i cannot shut up. so i write about you, mother & i do not owe you anything like how i do not owe him anything & how it is my responsibility to shut up & be chided like i once was. mother, there is not enough of my body left & there is not enough of my time left & i owe no one my words of those things.

I wrote this poem after the Brett Kavanaugh testimony in late September, 2018. It seemed timely to write a poem integrating the rhetoric being used around Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh; however, as I wrote the poem, I switched the narrator to be writing to her mother instead of directly about the testimony. So the poem not only dissects the language commonly used in rape culture and against survivors of sexual assault, abuse, and rape, but also divides the relationship between a mother and her daughter, who is a survivor of sexual assault. I especially wanted to reclaim the power used in this language and rhetoric to be used in aid to survivors.

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