ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women, trans, and nonbinary people who engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
***
Curator
Miranda Diaz
My grandmother has a china cabinet
That belongs to her husband
And is locked with three keys
And is full of sculptures
Ugly and bloated and sickly
Colors, his pride in modern art.
They can’t be touched, like the
Persian rug can’t be stepped on
And the porcelain can’t be eaten off
And the office can’t be walked in
Absolutely not, never, NO.
His house is a shrine to rich things,
A museum of the off-limits, and the price
Of admission is silence: submission.
The broken things aren’t on display.
Not wine bottles, not glass frames, not arms.
She is a willing curator, incomprehensibly
Willing, to catalog the cruelties with crimson
Fingernails and a desperate flutter of hands and lips
Frantically peering into your face to search for sadness
Dissatisfaction with the exhibit
Disappointment in the display—
Every room flooded with words.
Guilty sweet words, Band-Aid words
Please-don’t-cry words.
They evaporate when they’re needed.
When they’re desperately, darkly necessary,
She stands silenced. Stark. Unlabeled.
After, she rebuilds the collection,
Promising a renovation, always someday, not yet,
Pressing lips together and your hands in hers
To still the shaking and the shaken.
He’s The One
Renee Cronley
I married the best parts of him—
his humour, generosity, and charm
glittered off his calm, glassy surface
like the diamond he slipped on my finger—
reflecting the qualities he wanted me to see.
I never saw the current raging beneath
a rip tide of blood that boils without warning,
melting the 24-carat gold
into pools of nightmares
poured over the foundation
of the kind of home he wanted to build—
this is where I drown every day.
I suffocate on his toxic words
as he reaps my self confidence
and my energy drains
under his watchful eyes.
Once my anger spilled out
so he rammed it down my throat
and choked it out with his own.
Now I eat it quietly,
expanding with another weakness
and another place for him to poke that hurts—
a sloven shadow behind his clean-cut veneer
as he garners sympathy from those
he feeds with his silver tongue.
I hide behind baggy clothes,
trying to look less than
what he might want to see,
and try to disappear.
In the Hospital Bed
Carson Wolfe
He said it felt like ants
fixing him from the inside
forearm bandaged
from wrist to elbow.
I watched his heart
marching in jagged lines
across a black screen,
where so many lovers
had sat before, making deals
with higher powers
for one more day.
One more day with this
man who put his fist
through my window.
He’d sliced down to bone,
almost nipped the vein
that could have ended it all.
The nurse said I was lucky
to still have him.
***
About the Poets
Miranda Diaz is a poet, fiction writer, and public health scientist. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, where she works as a women’s health scientist (having previously been an archaeologist, stagehand, librarian, and pizza delivery girl among other things). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Breakfast and the University of North Carolina’s literary journal Cellar Door, where she won the first prize in poetry as an undergraduate. Her art draws inspiration from her experience navigating the world as a neurodiverse woman, the cultural heritage of her Cuban-Hungarian immigrant family, and everyday encounters with wonder.
Renee Cronley is a writer from Manitoba. She studied psychology and English at Brandon University and nursing at Assiniboine Community College. Having stepped away from nursing to prioritize her children, she has been channeling her knowledge and experiences into a poetry book about nursing burnout. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, Off Topic, Love Letters to Poe, Weird Little Worlds, Black Spot Books, and several other anthologies and literary magazines. Renee can be found at https://www.reneecronley.com/
Carson Wolfe (they/she) is a Mancunian poet and winner of New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize (2023). Their work has appeared with Rattle, The North, New Welsh Review, Evergreen Review, and is forthcoming with The Common. They were longlisted in the National Poetry Competition (2023) and have received awards from the Aurora Poetry Prize, The Edward Thomas Fellowship and Button Poetry. They are an MFA student of creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and currently serve as a teaching assistant on the online writing course Poems That Don’t Suck. You can find them at www.carsonwolfe.co.uk.
