36 Abuse poems

I thought we were playing a game in a forest that day. I ran as my mother chased me. But she’d been stung by a bee. Or bitten by a snake. She shouted my name, which even as a child I knew was not “Stop. Please. I’m dying.” I ran deeper into the bright black trees happily as she chased me: How lovely the little bits and pieces. The fingernails, the teeth. Even the bombed cathedrals being built inside of me. How sweet the eye socket. The spine. The curious, distant possibility that God had given courage to human beings that we might suffer a little longer. And by the time I was willing to admit that all along all along I’d known it was no game I was a grown woman, turning back, too late.

At family gatherings, a Family Friend liked gathering the girls to make us sing rounds. We always wanted the spooky one, Have you seen the ghost of Tom? Long white bones with the rest all gone

The monsters that come at night don't breathe fire, have two heads or long claws. The monsters that come at night don't come bloody and half-dead and calling your name. They come looking like regular boys going through your drawers and pockets saying You better not tell Counselor else I'll beat you down. The monsters that come at night snatch the covers off your bed, take your pillow and in the morning steal your bacon when the cook's back is turned call themselves The Throwaway Boys, say You one of us now. When the relatives stop coming When you don't know where your sister is anymore When every sign around you says Group Home Rules: Don't do this and don't do that until it sinks in one rainy Saturday afternoon while you're sitting at the Group Home window reading a beat-up Group Home book, wearing a Group Home hand-me-down shirt hearing all the Group Home loudness, that you are a Throwaway Boy. And the news just sits in your stomach hard and heavy as Group Home food.

The girl from Scarborough liked being slapped Down the hall from where her mother slept. A big, hard-working hand, anybody’s To come medicinally down, antibody To the slow infection of   her Western face (what sucked the most was that it wasn’t fast). Some birds don’t migrate. Above, two lonely fowl Scream across the sky their only vowel. This river I step in is not the river I stand in. We’ll drive to Leslieville, wherever, Park in the Guildwood GO lot and get stoned. Who’s there? Nay, answer me. Stand And unfold yourself. Her heart begins to pound. No geese go winging to the rooky pond No goslings disappear their small and speckled. If we endure this, it will make us special.

The boys who fled my father's house in fear Of what his wrath would cost them if he found Them nibbling slowly at his daughter's ear, Would vanish out the back without a sound, And glide just like the shadow of a crow, To wait beside the elm tree in the snow. Something quite deadly rumbled in his voice. He sniffed the air as if he knew the scent Of teenage boys, and asked, "What was that noise?" Then I'd pretend to not know what he meant, Stand mutely by, my heart immense with dread, As Father set the traps and went to bed.

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great sense that she should fall in love with him. He was Adán. Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin. And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust, like Liv Ullmann. I loved her honey hair, her full lips; her green eyes a nameless sin. (Not that I worried all that much— the church was Presbyterian.) In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment. Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads. Her heart I schemed to win with purple prose on meringue clouds. —For who was Adán, anyway, I thought, but nada spelled backward? While hers, reversed, called out,Ave! Ave! The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day. But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time: yellow light, mosquitoes, summer. I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house, without my tongue and almost blind, there was so much to see. This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time, but Eva stayed, a loss. Ave, I learned, meant also this: Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.

Seven years old, on loan to an uncle and a bundle of cash went missing. For three days locked in a room, beaten. The golden orbs of pennies roasted in an oven removed by tongs glisten on a child’s skin as she screams and screams. These round white scars that remain even today without pigment without the shadow of colour with only the ash’s afterglow. After telling that story you burnt your hand on the iron, burnt it yourself, your punishment for breaking silence. You rushed to the balcony but they pulled you back inside. You wanted to spit, to scream insults at the soldiers to stop them beating up the old man in the street. “Listen,” she said as she held you back, your mother. “Listen, you have to learn to say nothing.” Learn to be nobody. Learn to be the white wall that has no face and no tongue.

Terror is not – Ed – sitting in one’s piss. I know – I’ve sat there – I’ve slept there and did most of my childhood. That was warmth – in fact – and comfort – in spite of the unconcealed unconcealable smell. Terror? That was and always will be Mother cursing Dad and there there I am alone in that night hearing that door slam.

1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. And there was a couple who quarreled into the night, Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely right in the lives of those who love each other. 2. In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too. We stood there wondering how the salt horizons and the Dublin hills, the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes we thought we knew had been made to shiver into our ancient twelve by fifteen television which gave them back as gray and grayer tears and killings, killings, killings, then moonlight-colored funerals: nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other. 3. And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done? 4. We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one. Children were born and raised here and are gone, including ours. As for that couple did we ever find out who they were and did we want to? I think we know. I think we always knew.

When the end was near He threatened   hands trembling There is no end    never his hands reaching to my face You can’t leave taking off his shirt   going for his pants The trickle of sweat beading off his nose Moon-orb spray   metallic shimmer     slicklove Tripping numb night shadows Crows perched on a streetlight We’re terrestrial ants living in fragility On Huhugam sacred ground Jar of our dead Like ragged cats my ghosts and I Gossip in the alley behind a bar My eyes grasp theirs     a spark     revolution Feet without tracks on gravel Our existence erased   far off From clinking beer bottles and vanity On the bench outside a bookstore We get erased    see the news of the street Resistance getting milled My favorite ghosts and I bear down harder    birth ourselves On the bench outside a bookstore Frigid wind wants to snatch our secrets Hey nay ya na ya na ya na I thank you thank you for your presence My ghosts   I thank you for your presence Hey nay ya na   ya na   ya na  ya na This dilemma  oh ancestors O! ancestors !!!!   I thank you  thank you  thank you Hey nay ya na ya na ya na ya na