Don’t Take Me to Church

He never let me eat communion because I wasn’t a catholic, but it was okay for me to eat his dick. My tiny palms forced to stroke him, the same dextrous hands that coloured in the lines. 

I knew his God wasn’t my God. I knew she saw everything there was to see and that he wouldn’t reach salvation; no matter how many Hail Marys he said at mass in Ireland.

The Virgin Mary knew what he stole from me, what they steal from all of us.

I couldn’t fall apart on Sundays at noon when he took me to church—before he took me home after he did what he did—to the little Jewish girl who didn’t know she was Jewish.

I couldn’t remember it because I buried it in Survive, until, it was resurrected by nightmares and demons who professed caring and brought me to altars of despair to vomit up all the darkness, and when there was no more left to cleanse or tear out; light ripped in.

No one talks about the embarrassment that goes along with the telling, sharing and surfacing of sexual violence. How it comes up, how it comes back. How we’re always haunted by the deadbeat dead and grabby grandfathers who try to reach from there into here, pretending they are made of heaven.

I fled a friend’s choir concert because perpetrators keep stealing time, moments, sleep, joy, and friendship, in churches and baths. On my flight, I hunted for nature, soil and anything else that felt most alive in the hilly town of Nelson. Pretending I was like everyone else, I hid the panic that strikes broken hearts.

Our bodies holler: “Find somewhere safe!”

Search for a tree, ground, soil, anything covered in last autumn’s leaves. Dirt knows about living, growth, survival, regrowth.

Once you have been violated, fleeing feels like the answer but there’s nowhere far enough to run to get away from what happened to you.

Spring can be ugly, especially after seeds crack open and fight their way up—before sprouting, before the promise of beauty and hope. Everything is laid bare and broken and strewn with garbage. Nature is still awake and offering refuge in lonely towns where no one talks about being perpetrated upon. That silence is louder than shinshin—snow’s silence. Everything seems still.

I won’t be a quiet little girl, a mother who holds everything together or a middle-aged woman who acts carefree because I fear for the safety of your children, for what’s happened and what’s still to happen.

Lake Kokanee glistens after the thaw,  she knows it’s spring and that her waters will warm, again. Even if there’s no one there to tell her.

Resuscitate

My menses flow
singing hymns
of solidarity.  
Your saviour is not ours, 
we save ourselves 
from your imagined hell
and shrug off condemnation.

We, the witches you could not find
fuck or scorch
made of fire and brimstone
who invoke our holy and disobedient mothers—
Aravan, Chava, Freyja, Kali, Lilith, Miriam, Nomkhubulwane and Sarah.

We worship her/she/they—
sluts, crones, masturbators
and generational deal breakers.

Deities
not sister-wives nor she-demons
but liberators
whose labium and assholes
and chosen parts—
won’t be looted anymore

We won’t bat our eyelashes 
under your dictatorship.
We rise   
to save ourselves  
and your children 
from guns, Balenciaga, the opioid crises and captured innocence.  
The blood of Christ does not compel us,  
we covet our blood     
and tattoo resuscitate on our chests.                                                    

We won’t cannibalize the crackers you call flesh,
we denounce your eucharist sacraments.
Our communion is of the soul
on hills
in valleys/in forests
under the moonlight
far from your edifices,
sticky fingers and hungry mouths.

We howl and moan
delighting in the taste of liberation
on our lips, in our pussies
and the parts you don’t want us to love.
We are the glory
forever and ever
amen.

Mountain Life

I moved to the mountains to move mountains, to find peace in the hidden crevices of an endangered planet.
We pull out her hair—clumps at a time—self-harming her in new ways.
Wildfires burn up forests—hectares and territories— leaving her bald.
Our childhood stories become our adult lives: The Giving Tree who gave it all.

I moved to the mountains to remember that I am a creature who is prey, too.
On long walks on the back road with my tiny dog, I remember I forgot bear spray.
I’ll have to rely on quiet communication to scare and befriend bears if I should see them— unless she has cubs, then I will run or crawl, but not up an apple tree; bears are good climbers and they love apples, sweet apples.

I moved to the mountains to accept my fragility and minuscule frame in endless rigged peaks that have their own whirling weather systems that are always in flux.
The land doesn’t break; just dips and hides in private caves. Sinking into endometrial linings, she cramps month after month, year after year, day after day, from all the clearing and cleansing she has to do.

I moved to the mountains so that the predators of my past wouldn’t find me—their spirits crawl out from unvisited graves, seeking children’s bodies. How can we stop them from swimming in slhu7kíń^[1] or snowmobiling across piq kiʔláwnaʔ^[2]?

They won’t get past the forests of canopying evergreens that shade and protect the little ones.
I moved to the mountains to drink creek-fed water from my kitchen tap and to peer into the blur of a hummingbird’s eyes on hot afternoons while growing medicinal plants and outgrowing family, and to slam on the breaks for elk herds.

I moved to the mountains to know my heart is made of stars and bones from grains of river sand.
The earth called me by name, into her mountains where cougars stalk and school bus drivers put up with wild “valley kids.”

I moved to the mountains to move mountains—yours and mine—so don’t call to chat, my airwaves and airways are filling with the dangers of late-spring rivers.
They wash everything out so that we can hear the mountain elders and the spirits who live in nearby caves.

We find a silence that we aren’t allowed.

BIO: Rebecca Rogerson she/her is an anti-oppression-based scholar, author, folk herbalist and educator. She lived and worked for two decades in this capacity in South Africa, Botswana and Tkaronto. She taught in the Social Service Worker Program at Seneca College for a decade. She has authored multiple editions of HDEV, a tertiary-level textbook, and co-authored a neuroscientific-based paper about trance. Rebecca has a Master’s in interdisciplinary studies focusing on Bungoma healing practices as decolonization praxis. Rebecca, a neurodivergent who has an invisible disability, adores cultivating plants and channels her rage, despair, and healing efforts into creative writing, amateur opera singing, and disrupting systems of oppression in small but ever-growing ways in unceded Sinixt territory in British Columbia.

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[1] Sinixt term for Slocan River.

[2] Refers to the wildlife corridor of the Inland Termpate Rainforest Bioregion, which is the traditional and unceded homeland—tmxʷúlaʔxʷ of the Sinixt people. www.sinixt.org.