Some Animals Eat Their Young

"I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. -- Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely There was a time I had to re-learn how to scream. It happened at an Emilie Autumn concert when I was twenty-two. Autumn's music centers on sexual violence and the oppressive force of the mental health industrial complex. At her shows, she creates an entire universe for misfit girls and young women who struggle with mental illness, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and the aftermath of sexual abuse. At this concert, she did not sing about recovery or resilience; she celebrated her painful experiences and embraced her bipolar disorder. Above all, she created a safe place for anger. She stood on stage, an embodiment of powerful feminine sexuality and unapologetic rage, and growled, "Are you suffering? I want to see your pain!" I opened my mouth and, for the first time in at least ten years, screamed. I spent the next several weeks driving around Denver, screaming in the safety of my car. That was the first time I understood that art can have immediate and practical impact. I learned this again during my last semester of undergraduate study, when I took my first university-level creative writing course. The professor asked us to create an object of elegy for a person we did not know. I chose Christian Choate, a 13-year-old boy whose parents kept him in a cage, starved and beat him to death, and then buried him in a shallow grave. His disappearance was not noted for two years. His body was only discovered after his sister broke the silence. I decided to focus on what had been lost, on the childhood Christian should have had. I bought a baseball and a glove. On the glove, I wrote important milestones in a child's life, from first words to high school graduation. ..." -- from Introduction