Despertar

my very first time

Junior year, when I was in that farcical Tuesday night poetry workshop class, a girl named Brittany workshopped an angsty poem by that very title. "My Very First Time" was about being raped by her cousin. The cheesy title and singsongy, third-grade mini-essay-style tone were for irony. To disturb the audience.

The poem itself was pretty irritating, as was the halting Def Poetry Jam voice in which she read it. Also, it was late in the semester, and it was an all-girls' school, so we were all pretty desensitized to artsy renderings of one another's near-identical tragedies. By which I mean, it was hardly the first rape poem we'd had to endure. But I liked Brittany, and I had a policy of consistently offering everyone feedback, so I offered my comments and added, at the end, that I was sorry for what she had been through.

"Oh," she said, flouncing back to her seat. "That didn't happen to me. I made this one up. Ha, ha!"

That annoyed me so much, I skipped that class for the next three weeks.