Abracadabra, an Abecedarian

All this time I've been looking for words for certain difficult womenbecause they aren't able to speak for themselves, and now theClinton Foundation has come up with a brilliant campaign—theydecided, for International Women's Day, through digital magic to erase women on the cover of Condé Nast, posters, billboards, thosefigures replaced by empty space because women have not yet achievedgender equity, as noted on a website, not-there.org, and they're right. Wehaven'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 whokeep 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 herquiet, who may claim to love her, even, maybe getting even—or the serialrapist-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, andthen 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 thevalue we permit a woman's life to have (or not-have) throughout a wrongworld, 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, thatzero between them like a chalked outline in their family photograph. Or not.