As the World Splits Open*

By Andrena Zawinski

Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing...

on a woman’s hunched back—Marge Piercy, 1975

Six men rape and murder a New Delhi medical student 

on a bus, her ashes and their crime scattered 

to winds crossing the Ganges. 

  A woman is raped 

  every twenty minutes in India.

Three brothers take two low caste village girls, 

twist their scarves into nooses to cut deep into their necks, 

leave them to die hanging from a mango tree.

   Women protestors are blasted 

   by police water cannons.

A mob of twenty attack a girl in Cairo's Tahrir Square

in front of her parents at a presidential inauguration,

her body bloodied, clawed raw, clothes torn from her.

   Crimes against women 

   are repeated and unpunished.

Women go shopping, to school, to jobs in Ciudad Juarez. 

They disappear, their bodies found stabbed, dismembered, 

mutilated, torched––desert blood.

  Crimes against women

   remain unsolved and unstoppable.

Five soldiers rape a Nairobi mother, charge her for insulting 

a government body, her sentence delayed to breastfeed. 

  A crime against one woman

  is a crime against all women.

Buried neck high, stoned before a thousand spectators, 

a Somali girl suffers a public death for reporting her rape. 

Hundreds of Nigerian girls are kidnapped for sex slave trade 

to be brokered across the Middle East, Europe, Russia.

Girls bought and sold as talismans of youth and virility 

in India, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, are more likely 

to die than learn how to read. 

  Countless millions of children

  are ravished in times of war. 

On the home front two Steubenville quarterbacks 

and one receiver brag a girl you get drunk can’t say no, 

are videotaped for a youtube splash. 

  One in four American women

  will be raped in her lifetime
on dorm floors, in labs, in classrooms, bathrooms, at work,

or just walking home watching the moon and the stars

        as the world splits open, 

        cold winds blowing 

        across their hunched backs.

Andrena Zawinski, long-time feminist activist in the Women Against Violence Against Women Movement, is the author of three full collections of poetry: Landings (Kelsay Books), Something About (PEN Oakland Award, Blue Light Press), and Traveling in Reflected Light (Kenneth Patchen Prize, Pig Iron Press). She founded and runs a Women’s Poetry Salon in the San Francisco Bay Area and is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com.

*The title “As the World Splits Open” comes from Muriel Rukeyser’s “What if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."