By Erin Redfern

Featured art by Jordyn Roderick

At the all-girls school they taught us  
don’t fight back: the rapist might get mad.  

Against my will, I remember this  

when I need to take a walk to clear my head.  
When I fear the sound of feet, a distance  

closing. When I drop my eyes in passing,  

my neck for decades bending. On the train  
a man asks me what I’m reading. Show me  

the Great American Writer; I’ll show you  

a man who finds by walking out alone 
what freedom is,  

and, so, America, I want to be  

the kind of woman who walks into night,  
a fine rain, her own thoughts.  

If at dusk I hear a clutch of cries 

and rush of wings from powerlines.  
If I love a spread of stars, dark wind in trees. 

If walking is a bodied way of thinking. 

If I love a subway map, a screech of trains. 
If walking out and back intact is luck. 

If I have been a long time without thinking. 

If I wanted to go there by myself

thinking. If I just wanted to go somewhere.  

Quoted phrases and lines are from Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”; Judy Grahn, “A Woman Is Talking to Death”; Kim Moore, “On the train a man asks me what I’m reading”; June Jordan, “Power”; Lisa Shen, “Sixteen Seconds”  

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Erin Redfern’s work has recently appeared in The Shore, Rattle, The Hopkins Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She earned her PhD at Northwestern University, where she was a Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence. A San Jose native and resident, she has served as poetry judge for the San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts Festival and as a reader for Poetry Center San Jose’s Caesura and DMQ Review. erinredfern.org