Poetry: Stephanie Holden

You are a man

By Stephanie Holden

Content warning: sexual assault

Author note: The formatting of this poem works best on desktops.

You are a man

you do not have to know the statistics because you are not one of them but I know you are 32 of 33 men in the United States while I am one in six women I would kill to be one in 33 I would kill not to share this experience with three other girls on my dorm floor I say three but I know there are probably more a university study says that out of the 40 of us there are ten affected

You are a man

maybe you need a visual for it to sink in look at my face then eight out of ten victims are raped by someone they know so listen when I tell you that I trust no man listen when I tell you that 46% of bisexual women are raped in their lifetime listen when I tell you that at eighteen I am four times more vulnerable than an older woman listen when I tell you I am scared

You are a man

I do not expect you to understand but I expect you to see that I am hoping that some meaning will fight through the cracks in my voice and escape my throat because I do not have the strength to push out I have been assaulted I do not have the strength to push out this is not about numbers unless the numbers have faces attached to them I am hoping the words will find their way out of my lungs but it is already hard enough for me to breathe when I learned that a pelvic exam was a requirement for an abortion I cried not because I was scared to get pregnant but because the sentence alone gave me flashbacks and if I ever get pelvic cancer I will probably let myself die I would rather write my will at 23 than spend every night crying with pupils glued to the ceiling afraid of the movies being filmed inside my eyelids

You are a man

maybe you think PTSD is only jumping at gunshots but I can tell you it's not it's failing assignments because the author of the book has the same name and writing those letters in succession brings immeasurable pain it's needing to be hugged but loathing being touched it's not closing your eyes because the nightmares are too much

You are a man

you do not know I hate my body for being too desirable and for not being desirable enough you do not know I locked the good days away with the bad ones I carry the phantom weight of memories that are no longer mine you will never know the fear of a man behind you on the street or the sting of a name no one knows they should mime

You are a man

I, on the other hand, am barely alive.

van gogh to his dear rachel upon the loss of his left ear

By Stephanie Holden

Stephanie Holden (she/they) is a Halloween-loving queer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes about love, trauma, gore, and the self. Her interests are fantasy books, body modification, and the South. Find her work at or forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Press, Kissing Dynamite, The B’K, Dollar Store Mag, Voidspace, Bullshit Lit, and elsewhere, or her narcissistic tweets at @smhxlden.