Sometimes, when I am miserable, I read things that are even more awful than my life and this is soothing. Twelve years ago, my marriage was a pile of dogshit and I was really miserable and I read all sorts of stuff on Cambodia, including a biography of Pol Pot called Brother Number One, watched The Killing Fields, read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and more or less immersed myself in thinking about genocide. Today, I am contemplating quitting smoking because I don’t want to die, alarmed at how much booze I can ingest,  haven’t gone running in weeks, am afraid of the swine flu and awaiting the results of a TB test I had done on Monday, have ants badly in the kitchen and- one of my cats pees EVERYWHERE and my house is a shameful, eye-burning shithole. Maybe I should be reading about Stalin today, but instead, I’ve been revisiting Frances Driscoll’s book of poetry, The Rape Poems (click here to read another one of her poems):

Some Lucky Girls

We were so lucky to get them. Nobody else

appreciates them. Least of all the professionals who

see this as sympton, wait for anger. But almost

everybody in group agrees. And if some weeks later

some of us stumble around saying, I wish he’d killed

me, well, that’s just a phase most of us live through

and nobody’s paying any attention anyway except

the professionals who offer really good pastel

drugs for both day and night. Of course Louise

I guess basically she always just wanted

to see hers  neon flat dead but beled bad first but

I don’t think she ever was really objective of course

there was that matter of the vaginal tear and

he did make her take that supervised bath afterward

but he was so supportive, so sympathetic when

she was getting all upset in the beginning as he

watched her strip standing in her bedroom doorway

he tried to help her through.  Rape is never easy, he

said. Caroline and I were crazy about our guys

from the moment they left.  My rapist was so nice,

Caroline says. He wanted so very much to please

me. What do you like, he said. I mean, he held a

knife to my throat but he was so gentle.  And, my

rapist, he was wondeful. Well, look at me. No

visible scars. He let me live. He let me keep on

my dress.

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