A slap to the cheek sent me running
across the parking lot back
into the grocery to find my mother
among jarred salsas. They were strangers—
a couple—coaxing me into their car like
lines in a film without candy.
I knew it was wrong before
they asked, before my small body followed
them out of the store—ever-obedient calf—
before a hand tried to grab my skull and whacked
my cheek as I turned and fled. The Spring of my youth
brought cities that pushed hungry appendages into
my back, holding me still on public transit, at an
outdoor concert, at a crowded bar that smelled like
dead frogs. In SOMA in San Francisco
I felt the sun on my face before another
stranger’s violence punched it out of
the sky. Hulking, spitting. I saw him
coming and I did not change direction.
I steeled myself and looked him in the eye
before he took a fist plainly to my temple.
Stole nothing, said nothing, saw no one.
Tender, I watched him walk away as
he swore at the clouds about beasts
crowding the flood. Even this morning
a decade later with a child of my own to slip,
I sat beside a suburban creekbed when a man’s
dog’s nails dug into my back’s flesh from behind.
I eyed its owner who looked away and said c’mon git
in lieu of an apology, or any mortal word: another stony
finger extended from the deep, dark wood.
Back in the grocery and out of breath, a pink flower
bloomed on my cheek. My mother turned to look at me—
a rarity when we shopped. Her look seemed
to say, which kind? With silence
I said, neither. An inheritance and
a curse feel the same at the pit
of your core. Every day we are rounding
corners, observing the rack of frozen
meat.
Every day I am sticking to my route,
fleeing the scene of perpetual undoing,
carving space for a red
writhing thing at the end of the street,
at the end of my wrists—something
soft and still and holding.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
