Unpacking ‘The Rape Kit’

The book gathered dust on my shelf for years. “The Rape Kit” by Terri Witek. The book I told myself I’d have to wait to read, until I’d unpacked its contents, its weathered pages, made peace with its title and its authorTerri Witek. Terri, under whom I’ve had the privilege to study not just once, but twice, and it was during those classes I produced some of my best, most painful work, poems that spilled out of me like entrails might have in battle. Terri, who forbade trigger warnings, and outlined this forbiddance in her syllabi, a practice I found appalling. I used to joke with any classmate who would listen, that it was because her initials are TW: trigger warning–Terri Witek. Who hand-selected me for an international poetry convention, along with only two other students, my first journey abroad, where my two companions and I roamed the city of Lisbon and rubbed elbows with other up-and-coming poets, hardly knowing how lucky we were. Terri Witek, whose students were distanced via COVID-induced Zoom, who insisted that things would never go back to normal. What had normal ever been, anyway? Terri Witek whose work was as electric as it was terrifying as it was astonishing.

There were others, too, who flocked to her, most notably, the Flowering Poetess, whose face I never saw, whose petals bespoke some brutish handler trying to decide: You love me? You love me not. You love me? Love me not. As she blazed through her past, shredded memories like kindling. And me, wrapped up in pages of composition books (how many times can I say I hate you?), wrapped up in spandex and compression underthings (how much smaller can I make myself?), wrapped in gauze and bandages that stuck to the broken skin, wrapped up in myself.

My own rape kit had occurred a lifetime ago. I didn’t know what had happened to it, the body of evidence collected from the crime scene that was my body. The new dress, the panties, lace, black, sticky – I never got back.

I counted all the ways I was not enough. Looked for all the reasons I wasn’t worthy of walking among the healing, could these others see it on me? Could they smell it? Did the way I walked betray it? Emblazoned on my spine like a title: The Rape Kit. The Rape Survivor. The Rape Victim. The Rape. The Rape. The Rape that was as essential to me then as my own heartbeat. Maybe more.

I cried on the bedroom floor every week. It was inevitable, especially in the semester I shared with the Flowering Poetess. Her crime scene still had the caution tape intact, there were still a few investigators lurking between lines. I envied her. I wrote stories and poems about dishes and jars, about mouths and fingers, and bodies and bodies and bodies and bodies. But the Flowering Poetess, with her lines as graceful as they were gutting, with her chalk outlines and her visceral pain, made symbolism optional, obsolete. Camera off, microphone muted, my concerned cat by my side, I was there enough to be marked present, as I cried for this Flowering Poetess whose pain was so much more than mine.

I seethed against Terri. Terri, who had been invited into hell’s veranda just to sit a spell. Terri, who declined the devil’s offer to dance, who spat in his face and left without excusing herself. Terri, who knew the horrors of this world and probably of others, who had walked along the road that led to nowhere just so she could map it out.

I decided I would disappear. I tiptoed between enjambed lines, I picked my way over broken similes, allusions, and skin. I tucked myself between the pages of any book, anything that would yield itself to let me find a way inside of it, out of myself. I wanted to divorce meaning from symbol, to be so erudite that I could not be reduced to The Rape ____.

I graduated. I moved away. We lost touch.

Terri Witek’s The Rape Kit followed me, dusty, ragged, a little torn up. I never found out what happened to my own, didn’t know who to call, who to ask. I promised myself that I would read it. I fantasized. What was it? I imagined it was as carnal as years stretched into a single night of sitting on the bathroom floor, blood on my cat’s whiskers. Dark fabric, long sleeves. Unspeakable horrors, the depravity of man–something I must never read until the buttresses of my mind are fully flanked, until the safety of a rubber room was available to me at all times in the chasm of my mind.

October came, with all its imperfections, the precursor to what I assumed would be my yearly unraveling. New verse sprung forth from my fists, pried open, outstretched. With shaky legs and halting steps, we tiptoed over enjambed lines and fragments. Curled in my mouth, I let each word unfurl. A nebula on my tongue. I thought I’d freeze to death.

I did.

One night, reading my poem aloud to a screen that contained mostly other, smaller, blank screens. Someone pushed me into a corner, backed me against a wall, hand on the back of my neck. “What’s it about?” I couldn't speak. Jars or something. Yom Kippur and breaking the fast. Holiness. Despair. I couldn’t speak.

Terri Witek spoke. Yes, it’s about that, but it’s also about the body.

But the body isn’t me and I’m not the body.

Later that week, the Flowering Poetess remarked, “You’re one of my new favorite poets.”

Hardly a new poet, I shook my dappled head. So much clutter had amassed at only 25. Receipts for condoms at the drugstore, old-new fake vintage Polaroids, those blown out faces clamoring their way into my memory, the wrappers of a thousand too-small bandaids scattered like leaves from changing seasons (I wanted desperately to believe it was natural). The Rape Kit.

I had told myself I’d wait until I knew. I wanted to be ready, impenetrable. Strong. But what good is strength with nothing to hold onto? The first time I fingered those pages, I was astounded at the worlds they conveyed. I saw myself–as myself–for the first time. Not a victim, survivor, thriver, not a statistic, or a tragedy, or damaged goods, or a broken jar. I stepped outside of myself and fell into Terri’s pages, the ink on paper that outlined a world that had room enough for my unseemly grief. With every corner tagged, with every turn of phrase that brought my hand to my mouth of my own accord, with every line that left me gasping–of course, of course it’s like that, I knew what Terri knew.

I expected carnage and I was given a poem. I expected punishment and I was given redemption. I asked for love, and I believed I deserved it. I ask now for love because I deserve it. I ask, What is the lesson? And I am met with silence. In the silence, a poem emerges. In a way, this is enough.

Katherine Orfinger is a writer, artist, and graduate student at Rosemont College, where she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Beyond Words, Outrageous Fortune, Touchstone, and others. Katherine draws inspiration from her Jewish faith and Floridian hometown. She currently resides in Pennsylvania with her partner and cat.