Two Poems

VIRTUAL

Life was small, but no part
of knowing this was easy.
America said that simply living
in a place could make you
more important—your life
could get bigger.
There were many words
for brave, but almost none
of them were positive.
Everyone wanted to be rich.
Everyone wanted to die
old. Unbearable was the word
for an organism not knowing
its scale. Scale was the word for picking
something large, but small
enough to contain your anxiety.
Earth was our container. Honesty
was more than an opinion
supported by data. Data couldn’t speak
for itself. Sometimes we felt seen
or even permanent and that was
called love. Men went to work
on women. Even the most apologetic
ones said they needed time
to un-learn their power.
The Internet said that simply being
in a place could make you
more important—people
would follow. We shared
everything. The best of us
went viral. There was a band
called The Beatles, and
everybody liked them.

HERE IS A METAPHOR

Here is a metaphor: You’re a girl and your father cuts you wide open. And for the rest of your life, when you meet a boy he’s staring right at the cut. And you think they’re seeing the injury but they’re only longing to cut you in the same place. And it’s your job to forget the pain of the cut, the face your father made like you were making him do it, the tone he used after like a syrup thick enough to seal the memory closed. Instead, you’re supposed to learn to like the feeling of being cut. It makes these boys so happy. But every time you scan their face for your father’s face—you listen for the anger, then gratitude. Some boys can’t help but to think of your injury as a rejection. You don’t tell anyone. Half out of the strange binding (you made him do it and he is so grateful to you); half because you think everyone already knows. They must see it. Remember, this is your father who tries so hard to love you and this is how he loves. These are the men that might love you and this is the way that they love. And soon, it isn’t your body at all but you’re a uniformed officer manning a post, trying to discern who is there to fix you and who is there to hurt you—you raise the gate, unzip your pants. All the while, there are men who want to be your father because they don’t want to see you hurt again. Here’s what I’ve learned. Nothing. It’s so confusing. Here’s what I’ve learned: Men leave you when you don’t. Even after one try. Even after four years. Imagine all the lives I could have had if I had known how to love or be loved. Imagine how strange if the bee returned to crush the flower, its wings still powdered with her pollen. Now, I meet the ghosts of all the men I loved but couldn’t touch. You forget there’s air in the room until the fan begins to cut it. How you forget there’s air in the jar until he closes the lid. Sometimes the only thing extraordinary about me are my misfortunes. My fortunes. I met a man, I fell in love, he listened in vivid detail. He put the pills on my tongue when I was bedridden. When I spent six days with my head slipped through the handle of a grocery bag so I could catch my own sickness. He stayed as I moved naked through the apartment, unable to speak. And yes, I found him, but one can end up perfect smack dab in the right place and still regret everything. What about the other days? When a boy had the same soap as my father and, at the smell of it, I shit all over his bathroom. Where was everyone? It’s so confusing. As a child I had constant infections. I slept with both hands shielding my opening. I was raw and ripped and they said it must have been from me playing with myself, but as a child I didn’t play with anyone. Instead of playing I sat on the bed with my legs spread, my mother applying anti-bacterial cream around my vagina and even still even still. The world is so big but what happened to me feels big too. How is that? Where was everyone? Here’s what I’ve learned. The world is packed with people, but sometimes no one is watching. My whole life, men tried to do to me what my father did, but for totally different reasons. The act was the same. Their hands would gravitate to all the same places (Like an instinct about my body I myself didn’t have). It was so confusing. How are you supposed to learn to want something? I wanted to make the boys I loved so happy. But I couldn’t be touched.  What had my father seen me as?  Surely, not a woman. But I couldn’t

have been a child?
You don’t do that to a child.

________

Lizzie Harris’s first collection is Stop Wanting (CSU Poetry, 2014). Her poems appear in Academy of America Poets, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and VICE, among others. LizzieHarris.com