My hands are pushed up against his chest, his hands are in my pants, on my breasts. He says nothing, though he grimaces, his face close to my own as he leans to kiss me, so I whip my head away. I can feel the cold leaves against my cheek, the damp earth, can spy my book lying a few feet off. Just let him, something small, dry, miserable in me says. Let him, and it will all be over. But I don’t. I keep my mouth shut, and I fight.

*

There is no scream after the tongue is cut, but would we hear a cry? Philomela screams only in the text, thus in our minds: in that, her body and our own do not communicate. We cannot hear her. We want to, but she exists only in our imagination: an absent body that exists in the past or an unforeseeable future. She begs for help we can never give. It is absurd to suggest we could. In that sense, she never needed a tongue to scream for help. She never had one.

K. Frances Lieder, “Lights Out and an Ethics of Spectatorship, or Can the Subaltern Scream?”

*

The rape isn’t described in my poem “Philomela”: it takes place offstage, recorded years after the event by the character who experienced it. I left out the rape, thinking to reject a reader’s voyeurism. But the reader of myths knows what is left out: my silence, then, is not a revision but an invitation to imagine, to remember, this violence for yourself.

*

Procne, too, must imagine her sister’s violation. Philomela’s weaving thus becomes a muslin veil drawn over experience, both bringing her sister in and shutting her out.

*

And then his fingers are tearing inside me, his tongue filling my own mouth.

*

The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull;

There speak, and strike, brave boys, and take your turns;

There serve your lusts, shadow’d from heaven’s eye,

And revel in Lavinia’s treasury.

Titus Andronicus, II, i

*

He stops. He withdraws his hand from my pants, lets go my hair. I curl my legs up into my chest as he pushes himself, unsteadily, off me. That wasn’t much, was it? he asks. He brushes leaves off his clothes.

*

When I try to explain what his teeth looked like, what his breath smelled like, the cold ridges of his nails as they clawed inside me, I know I am asking for something beyond the response of your own suffering, your awareness of my suffering. I don’t care what you know or how you feel. I want to go back in time, to an eternal before. I want you to give me what no one can give me. Which is why, for many years, I have resisted speaking about it.

*