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.
***
The Burden of Driving
Danielle Garland
Tesla makes cars that do the work for you accelerate change
lanes gently brake download a better route accelerate again.
Tesla makes cars built on a deep neural network, built like we
humans are, which means speeding up in dry conditions
is just as automatic as walking a little faster when the street
lights switch on. Tesla makes cars that filter through
every option before the driver even blinks. Tesla claims
it never makes decisions without her, asks her consent
for each lane change, makes her promise
to keep her hands on the wheel. but still, Tesla finds her
on an app, comes to her in a dark parking lot,
remembers her address and the slope of her hips,
drives her home, changes her life. what i’m trying to say is
i went on a date with a man who drives a Tesla
a man who in bed controlled the speed the route
the curve of our bodies until it was no longer
a date. until i was no longer thinking of his hands
guiding my hips, my mouth navigating
his body, no longer thinking
of that sharp pinch of impact.
under him, i think of every girl
i know who has been in a bed like this one,
thinking this is how they forget
to use their mouths, thinking with useless
clarity of every definition of consent,
until it is clear i have never been the driver,
just a girl fighting to override my own deep
neural network that ancient need to escape
play dead beg the crash not to
come beg the crash to come quicker
The Pearl
Johanna-Rain Heimberger
I watch as a man pries open an oyster,
implants a plastic bead into soft gray tissue
and tosses the shell back to sea,
back to the work of breathing clearer waters.
To dispel the foreign body is impossible
so she treats it as she would any parasite,
builds a treasure out of a violation,
drenches it in light until it softens,
glowing and harmless as the moon.
Years pass, again she is pulled from water,
split open, gut punched into showing her white scar.
The belly of her body is slurped raw with lemon
her skeleton ground to cosmetic dust,
her pearl polished and strung on a chain
under fluorescent light, glass case, lock and key;
a man on vacation buys it for his wife,
flies it around the world in a suitcase,
lays it, lovingly, in a line across her throat.
Bent
Kai-Lilly Karpman
The Bad Men used to come for me
as naturally as birds returning from the south.
Not everyone made it back. One of my exes rolled his car
while nodding off on heroin, for another it was just coke.
One drove off a cliff all by himself.
I loved it when they did that. But for all of this,
I could not force a Good Man to appear. Then he did.
I used to reference him vaguely– as an abstract.
I spoke of Love as they speak of God in court,
distant and hypothetical. Something I might bow to
if you could prove it to me. But even now, I fall asleep
to a visage of those cars rolling, of metal and skull
in tandem. I was not washed clean. There’s still something
bent in me, immistakable and mean.
***
About the Poets
Danielle Garland (she/her) is a writer, science communicator, and feeding therapist from southern Appalachia who spends time with grief, the intimacy of movement, and the fragility of narrative. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Vagabond City Lit, Ninth Letter, The Inflectionist Review, Empty House Press, and others. Find her on Instagram @_daniellegarland.
Johanna-Rain Heimberger (she/her) is a writer, nurse, and aspiring naturalist living in New York. She earned her Masters of Science in Nursing from Georgetown University. Her work in public health is devoted to patient safety and the provision of equitable care. When she is not in the hospital or spying on birds, she writes poems.
Kai-Lilly Karpman has studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She has poems published in or forthcoming in Plume, Image Magazine, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Georgia Review’s 2024 Lorraine William’s Poetry Prize. Her collection, “Life Cycle of Cruelty,” was named a finalist for the 2024 Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award.
