36 Abuse poems

Though I can’t recall your last name now, Howie, I’ve been penciling myself in to your way back then, way back when, in your gangbangland, she was loose and gone, struggling up on a limb to raise herself off from your bed, but lost, fell back, let the all of you in again. Said just trying to get out your room was no use since she’d got her own self in. Curbside-mind, I venture you are still alive. Wondering what she’d think of that, but, then, I don’t know, can a ghost think when its body’s shot itself in the head? Hell, just thinking about it makes me wish I were dead. Just some girl, you, then you letting your friends shovel their coal-selves up into her, just some person. I knew. Her mother’s now offering a twenty-percent discount for crystal healing therapy on her website. In high school, she was a calm mother, dull job as telephone operator, back in that town her dead daughter and I always swore we would leave, back in that town dead to me, and me, I marry a man who mocks me for crying.We-we-we, he calls out, snickering in the gloom. Yet still I wear the dead girl’s perfume. And I’ve got an accident to report. Because it was all our centers, uninvited, you rucked up inside, then bade your friends park their reeking selves in the garage of her feminine. What did you call it back then? You balding fuck, you’ve forgot. Sloppy seconds. Forgot her slippage, eyes dead drunk spirals, face some fluid spilling down your sheets. I’ve been where she’s been, and I can be where you are now, switch my hips, sashay into your office to see you any day now, wearing her perfume. What pack animal would you choose to be in your next life? Every day, the marsupial clouds grow hungrier for our reunion, the reunion I’ve been packing for all my life. There is a swing set and a girl in a dress who doesn’t know about this next. First, she’s pretty. Finally, she’s done for. So I took some pills to forget I knew you last as friend. Then I learned the ways of your wiles, how you did my girl who’s now dead in.

The man slapped her bottom like a man did in a video, then he waited as if for shadow to completely cover the sun. Moments later archeologists found him. * The idea that they were reenacting something which had been staged in the first place bothered her. If she wanted to go on, she’d need to ignore this limp chronology. She assumed he was conscious of the same constraint. But she almost always did want to proceed. Procedure! If only either one of them believed in the spontaneity of the original actors and could identify with one. Be one. For this to work, she reasoned, one of us would have to be gone. * “Well, look who missed the fleeting moment,” Green Giant gloats over dazed children. If to transpose is to know, we can cover our losses. But only If talking, Formerly food, Now meant Not now So recovery Ran rings. If to traverse is to envelop, I am held and sung to sleep.

When she was ten her father left her at a Denny’s—You’ll get back. She walked the other way for miles before a car pulled over, a man shouted You are lost, opened his door to her. Beyond him was darkness. No lights, no signs, no people telling her what to do: she kept walking. Upright, strident, terrified by her act. Terrified she was bad for saving herself.

you lie in bed listening, waiting, fearing the moment your father returns home. you listen to voices talking in the next room and wonder why you are still afraid of the dark. his voice in the other room you would love to kiss. you cannot see your face in the dark but the blackness is there, like his back. if only he would open the door and look at you. maybe the light would be in his eyes, his voice.

Every story has its lean meat and its solid church so he started to rape her for years. However, owls close their eyes in the daytime because they’re awake all night, and she waited for him at the handle of his hunting knife the bells ringing afterward with the kind of lust she’s always known. After that her flights were silent and her voice, of rats and mice. I don’t understand sorcery or omens even eyes as penetrating as hers, but under her feathers and all along the tips of her flight where she’s let me touch her, I’ve kissed her fright.

I carved upon my desk unsayables. He drank until he vomited on himself. Eavesdropping, the others resisted sleep. The house knew the pain of sun on lacquered floorboards. I carved it with the tips of scissors. A door creaked; he hung his head into the room. Please, the others cannot sleep. The shingles twitched like skin beneath moonlight. I spent the afternoon at a movie theater. He staggered through brush toward a pay phone. The others continued searching the streets for him. The house held the moon above it, it was that imperial. I recall the room was empty when I came back in. He was arrested at the Quik-Trip while calling collect. Frantic, the others circled the block again. The house was ghost-white, older than the dead. I needle-pointed for 72 hours straight. He claimed the whole situation humiliated him. Relieved, the others refrained from asking him what jail was like. The house was swan to field, tiger to sea. I lay in bed by the time the others came home. He couldn't recall putting on the orange jumpsuit. The others asked if I'd seen him around. The house shuddered,No-o-o-o. The house winced, winked its blinds. The house whispered I should stay inside. The others flew out the doors and into their cars. The others slammed their cars into deer and cried. He was more humiliated than he'd ever been. He looked more or less the same, though his eyes were ringed. The others hid in the basement. He climbed the stairs and presented a ring. The house swung its windows wide to ice. He banged his nails blue, pinned his tongue to his tie. He packed himself in a box, sent it to regions far off. The others pressed their ears to the pipes. The house wore its flames like a hat. The house called a radio talk-show. We drank all night, laughed all night, the night he left. I shook in its mouth till the house drank me up.