Confrontation

This was one of the hardest things I've ever read.

I picked Glyph by random off of the shelves in C-11, and once home, days later, I flipped through it and picked the first piece of literature that caught my eye. And so I found "Drawing of Jude", and so it was cemented in my reality that the universe works in cruel and brutal ways. It's an emotional poem, raw and unforgiving in many ways, and I'm sure anyone who comes across it would be affected by the inner turmoil Katie Johnson spills to them. But for me, it was almost too much. I nearly laid down the book and chose another story, or maybe even an entirely different magazine. But I kept reading, even as my heart screamed and my eardrums begged for my inner voice to stop.

Johnson's poem speaks about the narrators friend, Jude, who confesses to her that he was molested by his mother as a child because she was raped by her father, and so he, in turn, touched his cousin when they were children. The poem follows not only the narrators' internal reaction to this, but also Jude's.

This poem left me shaking. My own assaulter's face replaced Jude's mother's. My mother's, my father's, my best friend's, my boyfriend's anger, disgust, unmatched sadness replaced the narrator's. Once I reached the last line, all I could see was the blank space of the page below it and all I could think was, thank god. Thank god I wasn't born to my attacker; thank god I was able to escape her; thank god I wasn't a child.

There is so much hurt in this world. My writing, especially from my sophomore year, is consumed by this. My mind was consumed by it, by the deterioration of the psyche when confronted with violence or abuse, both. So much of my writing is based on the reactions of people to tragedy even now, but it largely skirts around directly addressing the emotion that drove me to write it in the first place. Johnson does the opposite of this, comprising her entire poem with just statement of emotion and the process of grief. She unapologetically presented her anger, her repulsion, her self sabotage, her helplessness. This unspeakably horrible thing has happened to this man she loves, and no matter how much she hates and agonizes over it, there is absolutely nothing she can do to undo it. So by the end of her confession, you, or at least I, are as fingerless and immobile as she is curled around Jude in her drawing.

I wish I could crawl inside of the mind of people as they read this poem to see if the emotional impact it had was just because of my past experiences. I'm not sure whether or not her direct style is effective outside of my case. I'm not sure if it's something I want or could imitate, but I know that this is a poem that I will not forget for a long time. I hope that if I utilize her style in the future that I'm able to do her justice.

Johnson, Katie. "Drawing of Jude." Glyph 2012: 28-31. Print.

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