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.

Photo by Navid Sohrabi on Unsplash

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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.