Five Poems

History of a Hymen: Age 7

Bike-riding along Kelso Road-

the front spokes caught my purple purse.

With the seize and stop my crotch launched

banana seat into bar-hard.

Pain water balloon burst and clot.

My steps small, slow all the way home

told Mom I was torn like cardboard

and ached like the bleeding gum

of a tooth just kicked out.

On the couch I held paper towel-

bound zip top baggies full of ice

against my down-there parts.

She couldn’t Band-aid it better.

When I pulled my underwear down,

I ripped the scabs holding cotton

to my small flesh folds. If the hymen

I’d burst was thick, it would re-seal,

she said, taking the blood-rusted panties.
?

History of a Hymen: Age 14

Those February nights in Kirk’s Taurus,
he roughed his right hand into me
and used his left to jerk off in his jeans.
Fingering-he was all rat claws and teeth
tearing an tunnel. When it was done, he
wiped up his white slime and my clumping red.

By March it was the motel. He spread me
out on cigarette-scabbed polyester
and pried the rip he’d been working wide
as I breathed in ash. Pieces broken
and sucked up with each pump. My blossom gone,
stem snapped, everything left brown and rotten.

Time stills at times like these-puddles frozen
solid that seem like they will never melt.

History of a Hymen: Age 17

Johann, my artist-his thin fingers scarred carving off warts,
calluses with Exacto blades-was first love like crocuses up

after the worst Snow Belt winters. He knew of the trespasser-thief
stealing my virgin mucus ruby years before.

Neither understood a hymen’s resiliency, that tissue threads
and tatters can heal to a complete gown again.

So imagine our surprise during first foreplay
when he stuck in one slim digit and felt a pop-

stretched raw chicken skin burst. He withdrew with viscous
blood Jello-red tip to first knuckle, and I zipped back up.

Panicked we were small spiders clinging web corners,
awaiting the hornet’s thrashes between us to end.
?

Flashback on a Hot August Day

115 degrees and we carry heaped
plastic baskets of frayed jeans
and cotton underwear, hope to avoid
the lightening limbs’ approach, branching
and cracking just a few miles off.
Yellow beaks against flesh puckers
of heat stroke dead baby birds jar me,
their touching bellies like testicles-
out of place on the beige pavement.

Heat demons take root behind my eyes,
reach their hot hands down my throat, and
wrap burning talons around my wind pipe,
tangle up in my vocal cords. Their tongues
fork flames, and their eyes smolder charcoal.
They peel old scabs and pluck out stitches
of my oldest internal wounds. When you
kiss the sweaty back of my neck,
I’m a shuddering lawnmower that chokes
instead of starts:

What the fuck are you doing?

And I am fourteen again with the man
that steals me in increments, taking a chunk
every time his fingers are in me like I’m his
bowling ball. The motel bedspread stiff, sweat
slick, I feel pressed by the boulder of him.
He mashes up against me, a fist jamming
together puzzle pieces that just don’t fit.
His lips, rough and hard, sear me to blisters.

I just can’t be . . .please don’t touch me right now.

I pull-pick-pry the love knots you
and I spent the last five years tying,
the macramé holding us together.
But my skin doesn’t know you’re not him.
I want to throw myself into water-
a glacial Alaskan lake so cold the heat
demons shrivel into warts frozen off.
Maybe it will all fizzle out in fat rain drops
once the storm comes and breaks this heat,
so I bear the pressure of your lips on me.
?

Iron Heavy and Hard

The other girl that prosecuted Kirk
leads him into our sepia-toned bedroom.
He’s her rare vintage chair rescued from dumpsters.
“He’s changed,” she says as they get into my bed.
Like his venom that paralyzes
was left in some other victim’s lips.

His pressure stirs me a Great Lakes’ storm. I thrash wind, rain, waves, and take under massive steel-laden barges. I roll, a pill bug curled between mattress and wall. With jackhammer-violent shakes, I yell at him for ruining my life and sob a heaving Erie, Superior, or Huron. He says he’ll never leave me again. I’m Wolf-bitch, growling, and my teeth in his ankle flesh fat and drag him off. He’s ribbon I shake to rend. His blood streaks split my beige sheets. He, Terrible Giant, fills and bursts the room, kicks me to ground like I’m a teacup breed. His fist verging on a smash me down to flattened recycling bin beer can, I say “cops” because 1994’s restraining order must still be good.

A police-car-siren’s comfort.

I awake the dream iron heavy
and hard in my stomach. My body a taut,
set mousetrap. I suffer the foreboding-
the attack starts. My electricity
hums so loud, a wasp hive hit and pissed.
Jangle and clang my clockwork tighter.
Hairball gag and choke.
Heart skitter and slip.
He feels so near. By the medicine
cabinet I pop a 25 milligram
Alprazolam with a Dixie cup
water swallow for the loosening click.
Green and grey I look so old. Between 5
and 6 I convince myself he’s states away,
decades gone, but my jaw hinges
ache like I actually wrapped my mouth around
his Achilles tendon and bit in.
I get up and walk 2 miles, waiting
for his blood and dirt’s taste to dissipate.