Emily Jo Scalzo: They All Ask
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Digress
what surprises me most about EMDR
is the physical manifestation
of trauma
on my body
how when
I work through the experience
a dank, musty school bus,
idled outside my middle school,
the boy
trapping me
in my seat,
old leather with the rips hastily taped,
caressing me
without my permission,
slipping his hands
up my shorts,
on my inner thigh—
23 years later that leg shakes
twitches
cramps
jerks
as though trying to
exorcise
his phantom touch
before this session I told my therapist
I didn’t understand why
this has haunted me
through decades—
“it wasn’t like I was raped”—
and she tells me not to compare
my trauma
and find it lacking
it’s been only months since I told her
an unemotional recounting
all pushed all down deep
since she first said
after I called it
‘inappropriate touching’
“you know that was sexual assault, right?”
and this session I’ve been asked to
face,
feel
what happened to me
to experience the emotions of
twelve-year-old
me
his hand against my thigh like
road rash
paralysis of instinctive terror
helpless
to do anything but stare
whites bright
like impending roadkill
disappointment in my failure
to act
to stop him
because why didn’t you stop him?
they all ask
you must have consented
if you didn’t struggle
Chassis
The summer after my freshman year,
I blew off a four-hour minimum wage shift
to make $200 more selling novelties
on commission at the Tropicana 400
in a tank top due to summer heat,
sweaty cellulite sunburning slowly,
self-conscious with curves exposed
to the pre-race world I saw as ignorant,
but the NASCAR masses welcomed
the bulges in my bulky frame
as a part of their community—
for once I felt unashamed.
Emily Jo Scalzo holds an MFA in fiction from California State University-Fresno and is currently an assistant teaching professor teaching research and creative writing at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her work has appeared in various magazines including Midwestern Gothic, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Blue Collar Review, New Verse News, and others. Her first chapbook, The Politics of Division, was published in 2017 and awarded honorable mention in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards in 2018.
