The girl did not bounce off the coated man’s
knees. She dropped to the floor clawing herringbone,
remembering the suckled teat of her mother’s, her own
birth, the ocean she came into, then left. Leaving
his fingers, she cornflowered, became his minute-eyes
could not find hers in the flannel.
About the Poem
I decided to focus the poem on the ten-year-old rape victim instead of the newspaper article, in order to reflect the actions of the Republican Indiana attorney general. He has issued subpoenas for “confidential and sensitive” medical records based on complaints from people who were not their patients, had no firsthand knowledge of their work, and, in some cases, lived out of state. This has been called a fishing expedition. I call a doctor being targeted.
About the Author
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has been featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. She was nominated for Best of the Net by Flapper Press in fall 2022.