When Giorgione paints her, she is a revolution, one arm
raised in rebellion, the other with fingers against the brush
strokes, her blushed and hidden sex. I study her mounted
in my office between interviews, before Amber tells me
everyone knew what was happening to me. The room is littered
with articles and lists, bullet pointed statistics that track
the I-40 corridor and the numbers of missing bodies, women
found in dumpsters. Venus, she is in a duffel bag tossed behind
a Homeland Grocery, nineteen years old. Two men, they say,
Obey, or end up dead. I am flayed open across headlines before
I open the door, and the rules tell me not to sensationalize or
sexualize victims. They say, reveling in the graphic details
does not help them, triggers trauma, tokenizes the survivors’
experience. Amber writes poetry and long monologues. She talks
about her body and the way it’s been used, about the type of men
who are never who you think they are. She sensationalizes, when
she speaks, she cries. This is what happens if you cross us. I trace
each tear as it tracks, note their salt next to each statistic: There are
twenty seven million slaves in the world, you can sell a woman
over and over again for years, Amber's journal reads my body is a cage
and I am still trapped inside the moment you held the key used to
cut me open. Two months later, police bust a major ring in Tulsa,
my city, powerless as they recover cell phones, cash, condoms,
poker chips as currency. You use the chip to pick the girl and not
one goes to the police. Instead mothers encourage their daughters,
involve family members, insist he's a good man, this is just a
misunderstanding. Amber tells me that she turned her mother in
because her younger sister turned seven and mother took pictures
of her wet in a bath, blushing over something as she dressed for
bed, promised her to a man online. What can I say when the world
breaks her open? Amber calls herself a whore. Jeannetta says
I never got paid. Fifteen, a boyfriend took her, innocent and
excited, to a house at the corner of Main. Promised her protection,
sold her to strangers. When they drove off I was still there,
she says, I was what was left. Beaten bloody and stabbed
thirty-six times, she raises her fist to handcuffs. Anna shares
a name with my youngest niece, same caramel skin, she was branded
with hot iron, burned with acid, pistol whipped, gang raped. Once
he filled the bathtub with gin, made me sit with open sores, held
a gun to my stomach. She is twelve when she runs away from her
mother who is only a shadow cowering in corners from hands that miss
her child. Anna misses her father who is an empty well in her chest,
a gaping hole between her arms. Warehoused with girls younger than
she is, they teach her sex while braiding her hair. I meet her
seven years later, she says in the dark she can still hear the whistles,
a train, dogs growling. I think about jumping, she says, but I don't
want to die. I think of Venus, the pastoral scene behind her, green
trees and the simple emptiness of a field, sheets pale against her ivory
skin, red at her back. What can we say, we who have never bled?

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