The hurricane picks up

the moment our conversation

ends, winds finger my mind, my

gut, whirl across my vision, drown

the world in screaming until I don’t know

where I am, only that I don’t want

to be there.

Not all men, she had said,

and in her mouth that lie

—charging the air like lightning

about to strike—became

the truth. Not all men, I agreed

with a touch of that old madness, because it’s women

too, drunk on the same poison

that was fed to us all

as babes, the same hate burning

through our minds, needing a lifetime

to overcome; we all know of demons,

but it is easier to forget

their names.

You shouldn’t generalize,

she had said, but my voice would wither and die

like flowers on a war-torn battlefield

long before I named them all: those men

who dominate with their condescending smiles

every time I think my opinions are equal

to theirs. It is not

the monsters of men who frighten me

most, but those leagues of soldiers standing

on the bloody fields beside us:

the ordinary men,

the ignorant men, the men who laugh

rather than listen, who yell

rather than clean, who think

of their friends over their wives,

who speak of “reverse-sexism”

and injustice when they hear voices

that aren’t their own, assassins

in the night when we huddle in that darkness

for refuge, skin burnt and peeling

from the light

of the day.

My world is still shattering and spinning

in that thunderous gale, my feet running ever

away from those voices, when I remember the fallen:

the women called crazy

until they become it, the women

who lost their lives while reputations

were upheld, women who screamed

into pillows because even in darkness

we aren’t safe from their power. Help me,

they shout until their voices are hoarse.

Hear me, they plead until their tears run dry.

Believe me, they ask until they cut out their tongues.

And when I remember, the maelstrom clears

as if those warriors, forged from helplessness,

are holding back the winds like walls

of truth, protecting the stitches from being torn out

of my wounds, and I stop at last,

rows upon rows of headstones stretching forth

in my mind, millions who have been ravaged

and betrayed, silenced and changed,

and as dawn’s light grows

across this nightmare of a wasteland, I whisper:

—reminding us both—

They are wrong.