On January 18, 2015, at Stanford University, Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old student, sexually assaulted Chanel Miller while she was unconscious. On September 2, 2016, Turner was released after three months for good behavior – only half his original sentence.
The original scene ofthe crime is now a garden.
If we could landscape the horrors and build walls of stone (to call them beautiful), we would. But remember – even without these gardens planted, you can upend our worlds.
There are names we never speak in our households like giving Satan a title (a crown) – James, perhaps, or Geoffrey, maybe. The boys with ruddy skin & sharp teeth, the boys with trust funds and drinking problems.
The girls we worry about are the ones who think “no” isn’t a reason or that “stop” isn’t a complete thought.
The ones who break us are the ones who teach us rejection doesn’t matter —
nothing matters.
Boys aren’t always just boys. Boys can be feral creatures: unforgiving with dried blood underneath their crescent moon nails.
Boys like Nathaniel and Brock and Christopher.
(The boys you thought were beautiful are the ones who disrobed you with their lust & savagely attacked your beauty with no regard for how you crafted your stars or lingered over your constellations.)
Manipulate me, but I will always say your name.
I will not be quieted because like the author warned me, the girls who swallow their teeth are the ones who get eaten.
So, I will not get roped into settling for the garden of Eden and blamed for taking a bite of the fruit of knowledge.
I will not be silenced. I will not be vanquished. I will scream.
Isabelle Palerma
The crime scene where administration refused to let the words Chanel Miller chose be placed on a plaque in honor of victims of sexual assault.
I’m writing absences where your heart used to lie, lacunae where stars used to soar. You were my sanctuary, & I thought I believed in forever.
None of this is broken, but sometimes, parts of me fracture.
Every time I try to write, memories of who I was or who I could be resurrect like Lazarus from a tomb.
My skin is barely hanging on my body & I have grown frail. My desires are no longer carnal, and my rage no longer violent. (She told me the years would soften me like overripe fruit, and I denied it like my hard edges have an advantage.)
Now, here we are at the gates and Peter interrogates me — he asks me why I harbored so much hate, but even if I have forgiven, I couldn’t be lace and be defined by my empty spaces.
I feel like I’ve ruptured, and a part of me will never be the same. I’ve said it before, so maybe I’ll say it again, a fabulist isn’t always a liar — sometimes, just a storyteller.
I followed this line until it fractured and you taught me about the fault lines I never grew up along. He asked me if I still smell like autumn, and people clamored to say hazelnut coffee or brittle fall leaves. I never knew who I was, only what others saw.
I couldn’t be lace. I read through the doctor’s notes and they all diagnosed me the same –
a tired cliché.
This isn’t Plath nor will it ever be, but the most I can ever ask for is someone to love me as I am, to take me into their arms, and not to simply tolerate – not to merely accept – but to cherish, to celebrate, to worship, & to love.
You gathered all these different parts of me, all the different eras, and you saw who I was reflected through each, and you swore you’d stay (as long as I didn’t push too hard).
I’ve been pushing people away for centuries now, and I’m tired.
This certainly isn’t the poem I started, but now that you see me clearly, tell me – will you be the one to run?
A flame was never meant to extinguish this abruptly. Starved of oxygen, your origami letters became ash in a mouth that bled (for too many years). I would say goodbye, but the word is a branding iron razed against a smoldering tongue.
Forgiveness never came easily for the dead. Graveyards are full of grudges and barely concealed debts. When I told you that I loved you, I disguised the words (behind shattered glass bottles and origami letters confettied like New Year’s).
I remember your eyes cold like marbles, frozen like winter ponds. (I made a half-joke and thought myself funny, but your lips never curled up in a smile.) This is autobiography, but all you ever asked for was a poem or a story (but not this – not an obituary or an elegy. Not a eulogy or a goodbye).
I could never say goodbye. I ran from endings & ripped the last page out of every book I ever read.
Sometimes, I even wrote stories that ended in the middle of a —
White knuckle it, and the pain still sears through these autumnal bones. Crumble them like my skeleton has memory. It hasn’t forgotten the calendar days piling up (as thick as novels).
It’s time to start spitting matchsticks and not caring about the consequences (the aftermath) of fire.
My ears, stuffed with cotton, muffle the sound of silent, blood-curdling screams. I have crushed tears into my palm and have screamed silently into lungs of shower stalls (yet the world still whirls as though I were flung off a carnival ride).
I wasn’t being coy when I said “no”. I was being adamant. My teeth marks in your shoulder blade should serve as a reminder.
I will punch through glass with words alone. No amount of duct tape, super glue, will repair the realms destroyed.
Memories are like binge drinking. I wake up with my throat burning. (The ghosts wail outside my house, rattling the windows and causing the rafters to shudder. Begging to be let in.)
He mistook my empty for hollow and tried to fill me when I was merely seeking fulfillment.
Another left shadows form-fitted to my figure, lying, saying I was just an angel slut falling when really, a shove sent me flying. (The truth tastes as rusty as nails and goes down just as smoothly.)
He lied to me about the taste of electricity, claiming it was a needle to a vein. And all I ever wanted was the stars to be bright enough, I never needed a neon sign again in this town.
These memories are skyscrapers, and these skyscrapers are leveled by volcanoes. (And now, I am soaring like a phoenix, above the rubble, taking me beyond the landscapes I once knew.) No longer do I care about where these matchsticks may land, nor who may scorched by the words that sear.
Eryn lives in South Germany with their family but is originally from Oxford, UK. They work freelance as a translator and a teacher. When not writing, they’re out on their bike in the forest or dreaming up new ideas to write about. They are obsessed with vinyl, fountain pen ink, dragons and cheese. Preferably not all together. Their current favourite thing is spring blossoms against the white clouds. They are working on two new poetry collections which will be released this year, Masquerade Me and Death by Sugar, and two fiction works, a Dystopian Scifi novella called The Dust Collector and a Gothic Horror called The Black Cat Bookshop.
As a huge fan of your book, which features illuminating poetry on PTSD, I feel like I have to address that. How did you overcome your initial fears and write about a topic that is still so taboo in so many places?
I didn’t want to write something hard, or dark, and I really didn’t want to write a poetry collection that is largely autobiographical. But I found that on occasion when I shared an individual poem, that people really resonated with it. I saw that there’s a lot of poetry about anxiety and depression, but hardly anything for PTSD. And ultimately, sometimes, it is on you to begin it. It was on me to say, this is what PTSD looks like. So it became a collection. It was, and I think will remain, the most difficult collection for me to complete and publish. But I don’t regret it.
Do you sit down with a poetry idea in mind or does it slowly develop as you sit in front of the page or monitor? In other words, what is your process?
I should probably mention that I am an aphant, which means that I have no visual landscape. I cannot conjure a memory and play it back as if it is in glorious technicolour. If someone asks me to imagine a box, I cannot see the colour or texture. I see a nondescript box. So when it comes to poetry, you could say that I am a blind poet.
My visual landscape is layered with music notes and quantum physics. I hear a concept of a poem, a shiver of something, and I have to follow it through to the end. It happens a lot with a phrase, an overhead conversation, perhaps, and then I have to chase the thread to the end. I do not always know where it will turn up.
It’s cliché, but each person’s answer is uniquely their own: what is the best writing advice you have received?
Don’t lose your own poetic voice.
What are three words you would use to describe your poetry?
Lyrical Layered Whimsical
Why do you write poetry?
I have been writing poetry since I was 16, and really, have never stopped. I never intended to make something from it, I never intended to call myself a poet. I studied both poetry and playwriting at University but poetry was the one that survived the grind of assignments, of life getting in the way, and it kept coming back. I write poetry because I need to write it. It is cathartic, somehow.
Is there a common motif in your writing that you find yourself returning to?
There are a few, yes.
In Of Swans and Stars I explored the ideas of my own North Star, that place that calls you home, the direction on the compass that we follow. So swans and stars, are very important to me, and you see amber, being cast in amber, featuring often. I write a lot about Druidry, mythology and folklore. Dragons will always be in my poetry. But at the heart of it all, is always love. Love for who we are, for where we have been, and where we are going.
If you could attend a poetry writing conference taught by any author, lyricist, poet, etc., living or dead, which two to three people would you choose and why?
Larkin. I love him, I love how he writes, his raw energy. Peter Gabriel. His wordsmithery is without equal. WH Auden. I want to hear him read and see how it is reflected in his eyes. I want to see how he writes.
A thousand cranes Paper art flying For peace in the world A thousand cranes Countless painstaking Paper folds For peace in the heart A thousand cranes Flying their dance On white string For peace in the eyes A thousand cranes Quiet time Each repetition A healing caress For peace in the soul A thousand cranes Origami sorcery Peace in the world Starts with ourselves.
Isabelle Palerma 