Due Process
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
Nothing begins as an attack.
It begins as concern.
A question asked sideways.
A file opened quietly.
A sentence phrased to sound
reasonable
to people who do not want
to listen closely.
First, the story must be stabilized.
Not corrected—
contained.
Facts are not denied.
They are crowded.
Surrounded by better narratives,
better lighting,
better witnesses
with cleaner hands.
Memory becomes a liability.
Especially the kind that keeps receipts.
The one who remembers
is described as persistent.
Then emotional.
Then unsafe.
This is how the ground is prepared.
When the money is gone,
the language arrives.
Words like misunderstanding.
Complex dynamics.
No clear evidence.
Nothing to see here.
The numbers don’t disappear.
They are simply made
impolite to mention.
The person who insists on sequence—
cause, transfer, disappearance—
is reframed as the disturbance.
This is important.
Because systems cannot prosecute facts
without prosecuting themselves.
So the pressure moves outward.
Police.
Courts.
Care teams.
Committees that speak in minutes
and protect themselves
with procedure.
When one door closes,
another opens—
not to resolve,
but to repeat.
The same allegation
in a different font.
The same fear
under a new letterhead.
If one system declines to punish,
another is engaged.
If that fails,
reputation is used.
If reputation fails,
isolation will do.
Eventually, the target learns
there is no correct behaviour.
Silence is suspicious.
Speech is harassment.
Participation is obsession.
Withdrawal is guilt.
Every exit
is relabeled an admission.
This is not chaos.
This is iteration.
The goal is not to win.
The goal is to exhaust.
To make the cost of truth
exceed the cost of forgetting.
And when the witness begins
to doubt their own coherence,
the system relaxes.
It has worked.
Credibility laundering relies on one rule:
memory is optional
when influence is consistent.
And this is why
exposure is treated
as an act of violence.
Because truth does not need volume.
It only needs continuity.
So continuity must be broken.
The facts may remain intact—
but the person carrying them
must be rendered unusable.
Unreliable.
Unstable.
Excessive.
Concern replaces contact.
Process replaces justice.
Silence is reframed
as resolution.
Nothing illegal occurs anymore.
The original harm
has already been converted
into infrastructure.
The system stands.
The files close.
The narrative settles.
And the one who remembers
is left alone
with something that no longer fits
anywhere.
Not erased.
Just made
uninhabitable.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
