the spike - Eric Turner

i have a lot of uncles because my grandparents liked to fuck and some of my uncles are really cool and i took my personality from one of them, but mostly my uncles are men and i hate that. at my brother’s baptism, three of my uncles threw me face first into a snow pile that turned out to be mostly ice and i don’t remember if the pile was blood colored before i hit it or not.

this is not a poem, it is a thesis about violence.

my great uncles would jam their thumb into your throat when you walked past them. they named it the spike, after the similar finishing move as performed by the worldwide wrestling federation’s wild samoans. the spike didn’t really hurt, but it was uncomfortable as fuck and they always did it at the worst times. i learned from my mother, their niece, that the proper response was to shrug it off, play it cool. just keep moving.

today, my professor jokingly rubbed my neck and made a crack about being aroused. it didn’t cause any lasting discomfort, but it was a notable moment.

my ex-girlfriend once pinned my arms down and tried to kiss me. i was half-asleep and she smelled like a long shift and taco bell lunch. i pushed her away. she pushed back, kissed me regardless. when confronted about it later, she told me i was only mad that i was overpowered.

if i had any physical response to my professor, he would likely be dead. if i wanted to, i could have fought off my ex. in both cases, i decided it wasn’t worth violent response.

when i was fifteen, a senior girl who had been held back sat next to me in math. she would sometimes run her finger along my inner thigh; i would remove it. she grabbed my dick once, squeezed. i pushed her off again and the teacher noticed. he was ready to side with me, but i agreed to shrug it off. she was on the verge of expelation and had been a target of racist harassment. i would have been a reason for admin to punish her and didn’t want to be.

when i was nineteen, i went to a concert and a woman grabbed my hips and began to grind on me. i pushed her off, once again, and she pushed back anyway. i turned around but she continued, grabbed my ass, reached around. i pushed her off again. she was with a friend and the friend’s boyfriend. he told me to dance with the girl, i told him that wasn’t going to happen. we knew that if something didn’t change we were going to have to fight and we knew security, in a predominantly white neighborhood, would side with me. we talked it out, i moved.

i used to jerk off while my ex - other ex - was sleeping. i had sex loudly enough in the same room as my old friend that he made a reddit post about it. i slapped my friends ass in eighth grade because it was slap an ass day but i missed and she told me it wasn’t like me and i never did it again.

this is a thesis about violence.

i didn’t get into any fights that needed recording. i’ve punched a handful of people, called a few hits in high school, been tackled a few times. it’s not my favorite thing to do

but

i spent a lot of my childhood getting grown man thumbs jammed into my throat and that teaches you two things. the first is that your boundaries will be routinely violated by people who claim to love you. the second is to take a hit and get up from it.

violence is not the answer.

my friend punched his girlfriend in the face and broke her orbital bone. j slipped his dick in a’s ass and she never came to another party. my friend told me if rape was legal he would breed c. another friend started seeing prostitutes. a was forced into a closet by a guy who lived in her apartment but doesn’t remember. another a’s ex keeps screaming at her. unc stabbed a cop at cuz’s grad party, another cousin molested another and another and another. b called his girlfriend a cunt at the function. my parents scream at each other and my mom keeps throwing shit. my old roommate screams so much he throws up. unc a couple times removed choked his wife til she passed out. every person i’ve been in a class with either assaulted someone or got assaulted.

violence is the question all the fucking time.

i get to be a white man who presents straight. here’s the best part of appearing like a cishet white man: everyone with a gun likes my phenotype.

even better, everyone who rapes people looks like me. they watch football and smoke cigars and nod at me in the gym. they all want to be my friend. they all want to tell me about how much of a bitch their girlfriend is.

violence is a governmental system.

i grew up below the poverty line. the state enacts violence upon my people, my trailer park, at unprecedented rates. where i’m from, people don’t make bail; people make jokes about prisoners raping each other in the shower. sometimes people don’t eat food because they can’t find a job because they couldn’t make bail. sometimes people don’t shower because they can’t get a job because they smell bad because they can’t shower and they don’t digest right because they don’t have water and they don’t have food. sometimes people get hooked on drugs because they have access to drugs but they don’t have access to food or water or jobs and they want to do the drugs because they got raped in prison or by their uncle or by someone they went to class and sometimes we can afford to build clinics to help them stay safe while they do the drugs or even get them off of the drugs and sometimes we don’t build the clinics because we think the people who do the drugs are stupid or because we’re an npr listening fucking liberal who wants there to be drug clinics but doesn’t want them in our backyard because we don’t actually care about people when it’s fucking difficult

and sometimes, sometimes a girl starts rubbing her hand against your fourteen year old cargo shorts in math class because everyone’s been commenting slurs on her instagram and every version of herself that she’s seen is a maid who the man of the house fucks or a trick terrance howard whoops and she knows that no one wants people who look like her in  school and sometimes you let it slide because she deserves a fucking chance and if you call security or the cops they are going to beat the fuck out of her or put her in prison where she’ll get raped because people who are her color are seen by some people as a drug clinic that is allowed to exist but not in their backyard unless they’re being used like a sex toy or a farm tool

and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes a woman is not a bitch or a cunt, sometimes she is a person who is carrying the trauma of life in a hetero system which not only continually subjugates her but relies on her subjugation. sometimes she doesn’t respond as quickly as you want her to respond not because she has nothing to say but because the freeze response is next to the fight and the flight and she has flown as far as she can fly and fought as much as she can fight and yet she is still being told to do all of the work that allows our society to function while still being beaten and bruised in ways that only grab your hips at a ty dolla sign concert and

sometimes, 

sometimes, 

sometimes, 

sometimes,

your uncles jam their thumb in your throat or throw you into a pile of ice and the first lesson you learn is that everyone is as violent as they’re allowed to be and the second thing you learn is that you can take a beating and the third thing you learn is to forgive and the fourth thing you learn is to draw a line.

this is my thesis on violence: fuck you, fight me.

i’mma talk my shit and stand my ground. they can scream in my face, touch my hair, grab my ass; call the cops, file a suit. i got up from the ice pile; i got the perfect phenotype for trouble.

this my thesis on violence: my little brother didn’t get spiked.