Poem by Eve Lyons
How It Feels to Have A Sexual Predator on the Supreme Court
When I hear about a Great White Shark
attacking someone on Cape Cod
My first thought is always
what did he do to provoke the shark?
Is this why so many people’s first response
when hearing a woman was raped
is to ask what she was wearing?
Or was she drunk?
Anita Hill followed Clarence Thomas to her second job
Though years later she told white men in the Senate
about his lewd comments and groping
If you were sexually harassed, they said, why did you follow him?
Shira says that on her first date with her husband
she didn’t want to have sex.
He didn’t even use a condom.
Still, she doesn’t call it rape.
A decade and two children later,
they are getting divorced.
Maybe that’s why I never wanted to have sex, she tells me.
Katherine and I are driving and listening to a podcast
a woman recalls thinking at least I’m not being murdered
while having sex with her lover.
Katherine confesses to me that her first husband
raped her every time they had sex.
She had to lie to convince her family, herself
It was okay to leave.
When Donald Trump was elected president
so many people asked how this could happen
while in therapist’s office’s women confided
he seemed familiar.
He was the husband, the father,
the uncle, the neighbor, the pastor
they had known all their lives.
They’d come to accept this was how men were:
Boys will be boys.
11,417 sharks are killed by humans every hour
While 82 sharks per year kill some unlucky swimmer
The shark was here first.
The shark doesn’t come with cruise ships and spears
The shark is just trying to survive.
Three decades after Anita Hill
Women are starting to say
Me too
Another sexual predator is seated
on the Supreme Court
The men are asking the same questions
But women are asking
Why should boys be like this?
Should we let men be like this?
How did we let it go this long?
How can we leave?
About the Poet
Eve Lyons, is a poet and fiction writer living in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Lilith, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Mutha magazine, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, other literary magazines and several anthologies. Her first poetry collection is forthcoming in May of 2020 by WordTech Communications.
