It Happened in Indiana

This poem is based on the horrible things that happened to a young woman named Sylvia Likens. She was brutally tortured and abused, and murdered. That was in 1965.

She was 16.

Go here to learn more about the horrible things that happened to Sylvia [http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/young/likens/8.html] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Likens]

I don't know if it helps at all, but I can't help but believe that this young woman deserves to be remembered. Especially on this day, the day she died in 1965.

It Happened in Indiana
"I'm a prostitute and proud of it!" scrawled in burning letters across her skin,
bruises forming blue and purple spiders that can't scatter away from the light.
Tied to a filthy bed, naked and dying, she can't even avoid soiling herself.
"You can't ever get married... You can't ever undress in front of others..." the
words filter through the unending pain and the torturous days and nights.

The stench of urine and feces permeates her dreaming, the taste of shit in her
mouth makes her gag. Why do they hate her so? What did she ever do to
deserve this abuse? She is shaking, so hungry for real food, hungry for gentility,
hungry for escape. Could she run? Could she escape? Could she convince
someone to help her? She is terrified, because she hears them coming, like
thousands of venomous snakes tasting her fear, eager for her blood, for her pain.

She is swollen, bruised by the forced violations. She is naked again, their leering
eyes dancing over her skin, over the burns and wounds. They are laughing at her,
laughing as her abuser forces her to push the bottle further up. What will happen
next? More scalding baths? More salt in the wounds that they inflict? Or will it be
another forced tattoo?

Is this to be her fate, to die on this filthy mattress, locked in a cellar, in the dark?
She cries, cries for an imagined baby and a mutilated body, for burns and bruises,
for her sister and for herself. Forced into a tub full of scalding water, salt
viciously rubbed into the burns, skin falling off. Her bones jut out at odd angles,
the result of malnutrition. Welts from the belt rise to the surface, eager to show
themselves for what they are.

A 16 year old girl; tortured, submitted to a sexless sex crime and other horrors,
lies dead on a soiled mattress in the dark. The words "I'm a prostitute and proud
of it!" burned into her stomach, a 3 scarred into her chest. Bruises like blue and
purple spiders scattered across her pale flesh, naked and eyes fixed on oblivion.
Her name? Does she even have one? Or is she just a dead girl from Indiana?