Abracadabra, an Abecedarian

All this time I've been looking for words for certain difficult women

because they aren't able to speak for themselves, and now the

Clinton Foundation has come up with a brilliant campaign—they

decided, for International Women's Day, through digital magic to

erase women on the cover of Condé Nast, posters, billboards, those

figures replaced by empty space because women have not yet achieved

gender equity, as noted on a website, not-there.org, and they're right. We

haven't. But when I read about not-there.org and saw its flashy graphics,

I wasn't thinking about how women are not-there-yet, metaphorically, I

just thought about women who are really not there, women and girls who

keep disappearing (not from magazines, who don't make news in Manhattan)

like they've evaporated, like illusions, hundreds in Juárez, twelve hundred

missing and murdered Native women across Canada. The hands of men.

Now you see her. Not. Not-there. Not here, either,

or anywhere. Maybe only part of the problem is the predatory perpetrator-

prestidigitator who more often than not knows her, knows how to keep her

quiet, who may claim to love her, even, maybe getting even—or the serial

rapist-killer in the bushes who bushwhacks her in the dark. You're always safe,

says the forensic psychiatrist, unless a monster happens to show up, and

then you're not. Not-there. Maybe a lonely mandible, maxilla, fibula, or

ulna shows up, or a bagged body gets dragged from the river. Or not. Is this the

value we permit a woman's life to have (or not-have) throughout a wrong

world, a global idea of her as disposable parts? In the end, this is not a

xenophobic poem, not specific—it's everywhere. Not-there. Right here.

Yes, the sun rises anyway, but now the parents are staring past each other, that

zero between them like a chalked outline in their family photograph. Or not.