This next poem, unfortunately, is topical again.
I've always felt that one of the major victories
of the feminist movement, women's movement,
was to help our culture redefine rape,
and to bring a new understanding about what
sexual violence really means.
But if you've been following the newspapers,
it seems we're back to square one again.
And as we live now much more deeply embedded
in a global community, we see that rape
is part of women's lives in every culture
and in every country.
I was teaching women's studies at Cal State Northridge
when I wrote this poem.
And it's called "The Test."
My students bend intently over their desks,
the test questions swirling around their heads, the answers
gathering or slipping away.
I have taken them to the wall in The Handmaid's Tale,
where Margaret Atwood hung the bleeding bodies.
I've taken them there and forced them to touch the red-brown O's
of mouths, now silenced.
I have held in front of them the photos
of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
girls flying through the air, unnecessary angels.
I have held the photos before them, like a Veronica,
holding the sweated and bloody face of the Christ printed
on her scarf.
Touch these wings, I demand.
Touch the concrete before these women smash against it,
like bags of groceries you'd spilled going into your house.
They are full of life, not bread and wine.
My students bend over their tests,
intent on making the right response.
It's required that I test them this way.
But I would rather send them in the patrol car
to the frat house with directions
to write up the rape, touch the semen of a coed's ass.
How many kinds of semen are there?
And let us count the ways it gets around.
Here, I say, is a wound to compare and contrast
to no other.
Here is a little piece of culture on a swab.
Look under the microscope and see this culture growing
like a scream in this dish.
This red mouth, this is culture's test of manhood,
of womanhood.
And this outrage I force into essay
form so you can write out what we really know.