Something Doesn’t Add Up
A poem about the culture of SA
Before reading, please be mindful that this poem is about the statistical quality of SA.
What it hides.
Who it blames.
If you are triggered by SA, please be gentle with yourself.
Something Doesn’t Add Up
The number arrives like clean water poured into a cracked glass. It looks clear. It sounds reasonable. We repeat it until it becomes weather. One in three women, we say, as if harm were a front moving slowly across a map. Girls and boys stand inside the word women like children hidden behind a curtain. Their hands are small, but the language is grown. One in three women: a phrase that smooths the edges for everyone else, like a stone worn down by river. So smooth, something slips — the simple fact of harm, the bright, unmistakable wrongness we pretend is complicated. The men are there too, but only the way thunder is there before lightning. Present, implied, never named. A background rumble we learn not to locate. If one in three "women" has been harmed, what lurks behind the number? How many hands, how many decisions, how many silences, how many permissions quietly granted? We do not count them. We do not speak them. We let them remain atmospheric, as if violence were decided on the wind. I keep turning the sentence in my mind like a coin that never lands. One in three women holds fear close. Pity, perhaps. But not anger at the thunder that strikes the same tree again and again A statistic can be a cage with very clean bars. The danger is how normal it sounds. A pill we swallow, how gently it sits in our mouths, how rarely we ask what it has trained us to look past. One in three. I keep hearing it like rain on a roof — steady, familiar, almost soothing — and I wonder which storm we are refusing to name.


“The men are there too, / but only the way thunder is there / before lightning.”
That’s the sharpest move in the piece. It calls out the unnamed subject