Adele Evershed

It is always the women who carry the water
Each step wondering if things are of little consequence or everything
And somewhere—just off the path—a Greek chorus of insects or other things that
bother

Maybe it’s the cicadas slipping their husks like a cardi at an overheated change of
life or the frogs grumbling in the trees or maybe it’s a shadow that makes her drop
the pot leaving a puddle as the only evidence a woman was ever there

Did you know there is a Wikipedia page on the history of rape?
You can read about how scholars (men of course) cannot agree about ‘The Rape of the
Sabine Women’. Was it done just to boost the number of women on the street or was it
because the men of Rome fancied a gangbang?
There is War Rape and Bride Kidnapping and how once upon a time in America the
rape of a black woman by any man was legal and North Carolina was the last state to
outlaw marital rape—in 1993
I was almost thirty in 1993, married for two years and I sometimes said no.

It is always the women who carry the scars
Each year a wondering if the things they did were of little consequence or if they led
to everything.
And somewhere—just off the road—a chorus of all the evaporated women who
never even got to wonder that

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the valleys for the American East Coast. You can find some of her writing in Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Trash Cat Lit, Janus Lit, and Poetry Wales. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection, In the Belly of the Wail is upcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a forthcoming novella, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, with Unsolicited Press.