TW: Poem I wrote on SA weeks ago

Before she settled on 13,

cold hands invaded her temple,

tracking dirt along it.

There was no candle lit for her

No light in the temple, 

the one trespassed.

The walls traced by unknown hands,

there weren’t enough tears

to wash them.

She was forced 

to learn an unknown scripture:

that her body was a path 

others could walk through,

that her will was meant to be 

in her ability to disappear

and she was 

the servant of a priest.

Hands arrived like travelers

who invaded homes in war.

They mistook her silence for invitation,

And her delicate disposition with obeying evil.

She was the reflection of their thirst,

a mikvah they drowned in.

And she

worried, weak, and weary

assumed she was glass

from which they drink.

She told herself

this is what girls accept:

the glass being emptied.

At night she looked upward,

terrified the angels may record it 

as a sin.

the way people recorded hers.

Her tears they tasted 

like salt and childhood.

The heart always believed 

the body

is a home

and not a marketplace 

to be sold.

And she bowed in prayer:

“Since my temple has been disrupted, 

Will you still live here?”

The answer came not as a whisper.

It appeared.

“I am.”