Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

“Hey, listen to this: ‘Be always drunken.…With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.’”

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.

There is always the danger that the energy of the injustice will exhaust itself in the revelation—that we will be horrified but remain unchanged. The reason for this, I suspect, is that these are stories we all already know.

“you want to know what I think?” I did. He held me and said, “Burn it all down.”