A New Day

from Melissa...

UNPLANNED HAPPENING

I spent Wednesday with posters on the LSJ Story Chat. My online comments were "taken to task", so I put forward rationales for engaging residents in safety policymaking and confronting violence targeted at women. Exchanges are available below each story in a forum:

Wednesday's Letters to the Editor (Aug. 22)
Safety Plan (Aug. 21)
Police Say Husband Likely Shot Wife, Self (Aug. 22)

This exercise in free speech let me practice presenting these issues to strangers. Yet Lansing lost another women to murder!

Debra Waidelich - LSJ story "Police say..."

STOPPING THE VIOLENCE: HOPE, PERSIST, & BE ANGRY

In memory of Lansing's murder victims and to "keep on" stopping the violence, here is a poem that took several years before writing it (Jan. 2006). It is a poem included in Blame It on Eve!, my chapbook to be released in September:

Mystery Woman, or The Weights of Silence
by Melissa Dey Hasbrook
for Taisha (*see below poem)

In trying to tell something,
a woman is told,
shredding herself into opaque words
while her voice dissolves
on the walls of silence.

Ressemblage.
From silences to silences,
the fragile essence
of each fragment sparks
across the screen,
subsides
and takes flight.

—Trinh Minh-Ha
Woman, Native, Other

Mystery Woman,
I cannot forget you,
though we never met in the flesh.
I read part of your story
the time when
you could not hear
or speak
or write.
You appeared one morning in Brooklyn,
alone and without documents.
People stared
at your pendant of the sun and moon
imagining you “Mexican”
by its design.
They suspected you “illegal”
since no one reported you missing.

I remembered you
while visiting my Northwest sister.
Laying in bed,
I held her arm
as she told me of harm
the day her husband tried to kill her
in front of their children.
Coldness swept over me
and my stomach turned sour
as silence weighted
the passage of her words.

I remembered you
while vacationing in Paris.
Laying in a hotel,
I held my lover
as a man struck a mother.
Her scream cut across
the narrow space
between our balconies.
Adrenaline pumped through me
and I leapt to my feet
as silence weighted
the absence of her words.

Mystery Woman,
I cannot forget you,
though we never will meet in the flesh
because you were found that morning
murdered and burnt.
But I hope to write part of your story
the time when
you could hear
and speak
and write.
I stare at your pendant shining,
imagining you
brown, yellow,
black, red,
and white.
And I suspect you present and watching
as I weigh your silence
with words.

ABOUT TAISHA

I first learned about Taisha in July 2003 while staying in Brooklyn. I clipped the NYT story Burned Body in Brooklyn Still a Puzzle to the Police and wondered about this woman lost to a violent act.

In a writing workshop at The Leaven Center (Jan. 2006), the poem "Mystery Woman" poured forth, tying together several experiences with women violated by violence. After the workshop, I researched online about her, Mystery Woman, and found out she was Taisha Camacho, a teenager. To learn about Taisha, read more:

Photos posted by her cousin Michelle
Arrest for Taisha's Murder
Acquittal of Man Charged with Taisha's Murder