Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

What interests me is not what happened. I remember. I have always remembered. What interests me is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power.

This is a marker of evolving jurisprudence, because the legal term rape originated to describe a violation of property, not person, which is why it applied only to intercourse, and only to women.

This encounter with power was shocking and wordless and I did not understand.

We pressed out into the air, and the air pressed back—humid, turgid with spring.

That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.