36 Abuse poems

Acting on an anonymous tip, a shift supervisor at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers. Mrs. Haver was taping shut the mouths of talkative students by the time she neared retirement, and Mr. Vickers, a skilled electrician in his day, didn’t adapt when fuses became circuit breakers, a fact that didn’t stop him from tinkering in our basement until the house was consumed by flame. I used to want to be this bad at a job. I wanted to show up pissy drunk to staff meetings when the power point slides were already dissolving one into another, but I had this bad habit of showing up on time and more sober than any man should be when working audio/visual hospitality in a three star hotel that was a four star hotel before he started working there. When the entire North Atlantic blacked out, every soul in the Hyatt Regency Dearborn flooded the parking lot panicked about terrorists and rapture, while I plugged in microphones and taped down cables by flashlight—you know, in case whatever cataclysm unfolded didn’t preempt the meetings. Meetings, before which I’d convince a children’s hospital to pay fifteen dollars to rent a nine dollar laser pointer. Thirty-five bucks for a flip chart, extra paper on the house. Is it good to be good at a job if that job involves pretending to be a secret service agent for Phizer’s George Bush impersonator? I don’t know if it’s better to be good at a bad job or bad at a good job, but there must be some kind of satisfaction in doing a job so poorly, you’re never asked to do it again. I’m not saying he’s a hero, but there’s a guy out there who overloaded a transformer and made a difference, because in a moment, sweating through my suit, groping in the dark when my boss was already home, I learned that I’d work any job this hard, ache like this to know that I could always ache for something. There’s a hell for people like me where we shovel the coal we have mined ourselves into furnaces that burn the flesh from our bones nightly, and we never miss a shift.

Tightened jaw, I did not love. Flashback of myself  jerked about, legs high above my head, men laughing, I came to sea drifts, movement and crashing. I found I am not so far from God exploding. Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live. Seven storks still and white on a gold lake. My lazy eye glances back to that original split, myself  high above myself. Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’t know hours from minutes. I was hypervigilant for catastrophes. My head raging then numb. The early garden bare, and now, shocked with sudden memory, I return to changing sky hues, blooms of lilac bursting along sidewalks. Lazy in the grass, I free myself of guilt, imagine musicians in the park, us overcoming ourselves. My eyes open before stars. Holy these leaves, these skies. What is torn opens for the light.

yum yum the stars are out. I'll never forget how you smelled that night. like cheddar cheese melting under fluorescent light. like a day-old rainbow fish. what a dish. gotta lick my lips. gotta dream I day- dream. thorozine brain cloud. rain rain comes com- ing down. all over her. there she is on the hill. pale as a posy. getting soaking wet. hope her petticoats shrink. well little shepherd girl your gonna kingdom come. looking so clean. the guardian of every little lamb. well beep beep sheep I'm moving in. I'm gonna peep in bo's bodice. lay down darling don't be modest let me slip my hand in. ohhh that's soft that's nice that's not used up. ohhh don't cry. wet what's wet? oh that. heh heh. that's just the rain lambie pie. now don't squirm. let me put my rubber on. I'm a wolf in a lamb skin trojan. ohh yeah that's hard that's good. now don't tighten up. open up be- bop. lift that little butt up. ummm open wider be-bop. come on. nothing. can. stop me. now. ohhh ahhh. isn't that good. my. melancholy be-bop. Oh don't cry. come on get up. let's dance in the grass. let's cut a rug let's jitterbug. roll those tiny white stockings down. bobby sock-o let's flow. come on this is a dance contest. under the stars, let's alice in the grass. let's swing betty boop hoop let's birdland let's stroll let's rock let's roll let's whalebone let's go let's deodorize the night.

There are too many of us for you to believe you are either alone or responsible. No woman asks for this. Some are children. Some are boys. Every one of us should have been heard. This is for Anna, age 17, who was then beaten and left to die; for Nathan, who at 11 admired the basketball coach; for Rosaline, who sees in her baby the face of a rapist and who finds that face difficult to love; for sisters when soldiers came, mothers imprisoned among guards, for aunties grandmas daughters sons, for one who was tied and one who tried to scream, one whose husband watched, one violated time after time, one torn apart, who called the police who did not call her back, who went to the clinic where there were no kits, who numbed her shame with drugs, who could not drink enough to forget, who took her life, who believed she was an object, who said nothing, who knew no one was there and that no one would ever be there. Know this: there are so many that if we could speak, our voices might spread like floodwaters over their boots and swell past security stations; that if we cried out together we might finally understand it as an assault on all people, all creation, and maybe then there would be justice in this war to claim yourself, a struggle mapped all over the flesh of every woman or child who has known what it is to be used, as you were, your sacred body.

She is girl. She is gravel. She is grabbed. She is grabbed like handfuls of gravel. Gravel grated by water. Her village is full of gravel fields. It is 1950. She is girl. She is grabbed. She is not my grandmother, though my grandmother is girl. My grandmother’s father closes the gates. Against American soldiers, though they jump over stone walls. To a girl who is not my grandmother. The girl is gravel grabbed. Her language is gravel because it means nothing. Hands full of girl. Fields full of gravel. Korea is gravel and graves. Girl is girl and she will never be a grandmother. She will be girl, girl is gravel and history will skip her like stone over water. Oh girl, oh glory. Girl.

I can’t get my head around it. How did we devise a concept like just war:the slain of the Lord are dung upon the ground. I know there are distinctions it is important to make and I don’t expect perfection but the chicanery of subtle thought . . . if I pick it all apart will anything be left to sew back into sense? Cleverer minds are reconciled. Cultured, poised, the government official (Should I give him spectacles? Should they reflect the light?) pauses and replies: The President regrets . . . but consider the alternative … would you offer succour… and I can almost understand. I sleep with reason as my lover, wake beside a monster in my bed. I fumble beneath the mask, shape my lips to the prospect of a kill, feel your thigh against my rump, your fingers at my throat. Oh, Rakosi, I’m still strumming on my lyre. Is there really so much wrong with that? I’m embarrassed by the flimsiness of my resolve, the silliness of saints and monsters, conversations with a being who can’t plausibly exist, this mockery of flagellation: this is my defective heart, this my amputated foot, this the bandage from around my head. A monster dies in the middle of his trial, another denies the power of the court, two more evade arrest: in politic’s parlour game, each day annuls the last. 9/11, I say, and Afghanistan, Bali and Iraq, but I can’t fix a year to each event, what is, what well might be, are steam against a bathroom mirror: I see bits, an eye but not its double, the other ear, a chin that lacks a jawbone for support.

It’s possible I misconstrued you, laid too much emphasis on the uniqueness of a birth, failed to acknowledge circumstance could corrupt, sustain; I indulged myself in accusations against an absolute. I don’t believe what I then believed. You are not responsible for Leibniz or the Lisbon quake, for the twenty-six-eyed and sixty-arsed box jellyfish, that the cosmos is shaped like a soccer ball; or for the dosido of right and wrong around the garden bed. You are not the monster I thought you were, not by definition or necessity the one immutable. You are a creator caught in a creator’s net, in fact a creature. Every horror has its own pathology, the disease infects the flock. Prey present as predators, the malefactors replicate even as the angels experiment with cures. Each encounter pulls against reductive story, says I will not, I am just (an instant, an instance), and reference skews on maps not drawn to scale. I know saintliness exists. It’s all around me. My next door neighbours in their simple modesty, the lady down the street who is always helping someone older than herself. Even the slow judicial process conceives it natural to be better than we are. I’m trying to shoo the gloomy birds away but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost when I was drawn from the womb?

I’ve stopped asking: ¿Why? I’ve let a man whistle from the table for more beer, & brought it to him with a smile. I’ve slapped a man & ran while he laughed — atrevida. I’ve had a miscarriage. I’ve let a man kiss me after an abortion & comforted his hot tears. I’ve done these things, while other girls work in maquilas piecing together Dell computer boards, while other girls work in brothels, & cake foundation across their bruised arms, while other girls ride the bus home alone at night, every night, while other girls are found wearing clothes that don’t belong to them, or no clothes at all. I’ve done all of this while other girls are found with puta written in blood across their broken bellies. My mother used to cover my eyes when we’d walk by girls working the corner, & say: See how lucky you are, not to have to work like they do? I have been muy puta, have been called puta. Yes, I’d say,very lucky.

Calláte. Don’t say it out loud: the color of his hair, the sour odor of his skin, the way they say his stomach rose when he slept. I have done nothing, said nothing. I piss in the corner of the room, the outhouse is far, I think orange blossoms call me to eat them. I fling rocks at bats hanging midway up almond trees. I’ve skinned lizards. I’ve been bored. It’s like that time I told my friend Luz to rub her lice against my hair. I wanted to wear a plastic bag, to smell of gasoline, to shave my hair, to feel something like his hands on my head. When I clutch pillows, I think of him. If he sleeps facedown like I do. If he can tie strings to the backs of dragonflies. I’ve heard of how I used to run to him. His hair still smelling of fish, gasoline, and seaweed. It’s how I learned to walk they say. Calláte. If I step out this door, I want to know nothing will take me. Not the van he ran to. Not the man he paid to take him. Mamá Pati was asleep when he left. People say somehow I walked across our cornfield at dawn, a few steps behind. I must have seen him get in that van. I was two. I sat behind a ceiba tree, waiting. No one could find me.

—for perfidious protectors I was playing in the street no one paid attention to me as I made forms out of sand mumbling Rimbaud under my breath once an elderly gentleman overheard it —little boy you are a poet just now we are organizing a grass-roots literary movement he stroked my dirty head gave me a large lollypop and even bought clothes in the protective coloring of youth I didn’t have such a splendid suit since first communion short trousers and a wide sailor’s collar black patent leather shoes with a buckle white knee-high socks the elderly gentleman took me by the hand and led the way to the ball other boys were there also in short trousers carefully shaven shuffling their feet —well boys now it’s time to play why are you standing in the corners asked the elderly gentleman —make a circle holding hands but we didn’t want tag or blindman’s buff we had enough of the elderly gentleman we were very hungry so we were seated promptly around a large table given lemonade and pieces of cake now disguised as adults with deep voices the boys got up they praised us or slapped us on our hands we didn’t hear anything didn’t feel anything staring with great eyes at the piece of cake that kept melting in our hot hands and this sweet taste the first in our lives disappeared inside our dark sleeves