sexual assault

Andrea Rogers

Date​ ​Rape​ ​Actress

“You’re just an empty cage, girl,

If you kill the bird”

– Tori Amos, “Crucify”

At sixteen, she felt it

when the man gave her

moonshine: that slowing

of blood, strange feeling

of floating out.

And so she became a bird,

buoyed, looking upon the body;

saw it groped, kissed,

discarded, propped against

a tree, mindless, poisoned.

The body, thawing, rocked

back and forth ’til morning, when,

the vomit drying on its …