Shock

This poem stays with the shock that often follows sexual violence.

Not only the violence itself, but the moments after, when the body knows something before the mind can let it in.

The repetitions, interruptions, and unfinished thoughts come from that place. Not as a device, but because this is how it feels: recognition arriving in pieces, language failing, time losing its shape.

This piece remains inside that fragmented space when reality is too brutal to absorb all at once.

This is one of the poems where form mattered as much as content.

I remember feeling the need to capture shock not as an emotion but as an experience of cognition breaking down.

There is a moment after certain kinds of pain where language stops functioning normally.

• Words become inaccessible.
• Breath becomes difficult.
• Reality starts feeling impossible.

The repeated attempts to say what happened mirror that process of approaching truth and recoiling from it over and over until eventually the sentence becomes speakable.

And even then it does not become acceptable.

One of the hardest things about profound harm is that recognition itself can feel violent.

Not because truth is wrong.

But because allowing reality to become real changes everything that follows.

I think this poem understands that moment better than I could have explained it directly at the time.

I wrote this after witnessing something that stayed with me for a long time.

I had gone to a comedy show in Denver with someone I was growing close to. Afterward we walked through the city late into the night, talking about our pasts and the futures we hoped for. It had been one of those conversations that leaves you feeling unusually open and connected.

As we were walking back to my car, we passed a club.

Suddenly a car came screeching down the street and stopped hard in front of the entrance.

There was yelling.

Then a door opened and someone was shoved out.

She hit the ground.

The door slammed shut and the car sped away.

She got up sobbing and stumbled toward the bouncers at the entrance.

Immediately they moved.

One helped support her over to the sidewalk. Another jumped into a car to race after the other vehicle and try to get the license plate.

We crossed the street and waited until the police arrived beacause it felt important to remain in case witnesses were needed.

What I remember most was not what had already happened.

It was what happened next.

One of the bouncers kept gently asking what had happened to her.

• She kept trying to answer.
• Trying to speak.
• Trying to put words around something that seemed too large and too impossible to fit into language.

She kept breathing in these deep, heaving gasps.

She repeated fragments.

Started sentences and lost them.

And slowly I realized I was watching someone trying to let reality become real.

I went home afterward carrying a visceral intensity I didn’t know what to do with.

This poem came out of that.

Not to tell her story.

Not to recreate what happened.

But to honor that moment where language fractures under the weight of pain and truth struggles to become speakable.