You don’t need to remember every moment. You don’t need to carry meaning forward. You don’t need to decide what this was.

“Shut Up and Listen to Survivors” operates less as a protest poem and more as a clinical case statement rendered in voice. Written in 2016 in response to survivors of military sexual trauma (MST) being heard but not meaningfully responded to during U.S. Senate proceedings, the poem articulates a familiar trauma dynamic: testimony offered in good faith, followed by institutional non-response.