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Description
We’re driving down quiet roads toward our city,
the port city of cobblestones and brick warehouses,
hoop-eared punks and camoed rednecks prowling
in tacit armistice along the riverbanks.
She curses the Ford that blinds us
with its blue-white high beams,
and starts the playlist ‘back in MY day,’
skipping Papa Roach -- an apologetic smile
as we both grimace remembering
the times we felt they were relatable --
landing on the Chili Peppers.
The ashtray’s full and I’m spillin’ my guts
She jokes that she’s not sure
how any of us survived so much, uh,
so much angst without trips to white-walled rooms.
I eye the tidy row on her wrist, ivoried scars,
the 70-degree-angle intersection
that follows her heart’s blue highway,
and recall the jagged words
she Stanley-knifed into her thigh -- see no evil,
a punishment for looking, for saying nothing
when a man pulled his shorts to his knees
and asked her opinion while he stroked himself.

She notices my gaze but stays silent,
hands fidgeting on the steering wheel,
searching the console for absent cigarettes.
There’s just too much that time cannot erase
She squeezes her eyes shut, then glances up at the stars
that fade with each approaching streetlight.
An anniversary for her, perhaps; one of many
uncelebrated days that summon the memories,
open them like pop-ups behind her eyes.

As we pass a field of moonlit cornstalks
she says, “These lines of poorly-laid collagen
aren’t failed attempts
inspired by sad music about abortions and ODs.”
“What are they then?”
“A coping mechanism.
An addiction.
The fingerprints of men I wanted
to want me but didn’t always want
to touch me.” She strokes her left wrist
with her right thumb, gently, as if the skin is still torn.
“He was the first of them all,
my down-the-road, not across-the-street,
and if there is an explanation,
he wrote it on a blanket
in the blood of my thirteen-year-old self,
evidence that he could not wash away
or erase from his hard drive, probably still hidden
in the small closet of his quiet house.”
I know better than to comfort her by hand,
know I am allowed only simple questions or silence
in these rare revelatory moments.
“What would it explain?”
She hits next on the iPod beneath her emergency brake --
we never armed our souls
for what the future would hold
She laughs quietly, and it sounds
like eight years of bitterness against the children of God
who hung their millstone of judgment
around the neck of a stumbling little one.
She looks at me then, eyes bright and colorless
in the alien light of the radio, and says
“Why I let them fuck me.”

Description
We’re driving down quiet roads toward our city,
the port city of cobblestones and brick warehouses,
hoop-eared punks and camoed rednecks prowling
in tacit armistice along the riverbanks.
She curses the Ford that blinds us
with its blue-white high beams,
and starts the playlist ‘back in MY day,’
skipping Papa Roach -- an apologetic smile
as we both grimace remembering
the times we felt they were relatable --
landing on the Chili Peppers.
The ashtray’s full and I’m spillin’ my guts
She jokes that she’s not sure
how any of us survived so much, uh,
so much angst without trips to white-walled rooms.
I eye the tidy row on her wrist, ivoried scars,
the 70-degree-angle intersection
that follows her heart’s blue highway,
and recall the jagged words
she Stanley-knifed into her thigh -- see no evil,
a punishment for looking, for saying nothing
when a man pulled his shorts to his knees
and asked her opinion while he stroked himself.

She notices my gaze but stays silent,
hands fidgeting on the steering wheel,
searching the console for absent cigarettes.
There’s just too much that time cannot erase
She squeezes her eyes shut, then glances up at the stars
that fade with each approaching streetlight.
An anniversary for her, perhaps; one of many
uncelebrated days that summon the memories,
open them like pop-ups behind her eyes.

As we pass a field of moonlit cornstalks
she says, “These lines of poorly-laid collagen
aren’t failed attempts
inspired by sad music about abortions and ODs.”
“What are they then?”
“A coping mechanism.
An addiction.
The fingerprints of men I wanted
to want me but didn’t always want
to touch me.” She strokes her left wrist
with her right thumb, gently, as if the skin is still torn.
“He was the first of them all,
my down-the-road, not across-the-street,
and if there is an explanation,
he wrote it on a blanket
in the blood of my thirteen-year-old self,
evidence that he could not wash away
or erase from his hard drive, probably still hidden
in the small closet of his quiet house.”
I know better than to comfort her by hand,
know I am allowed only simple questions or silence
in these rare revelatory moments.
“What would it explain?”
She hits next on the iPod beneath her emergency brake --
we never armed our souls
for what the future would hold
She laughs quietly, and it sounds
like eight years of bitterness against the children of God
who hung their millstone of judgment
around the neck of a stumbling little one.
She looks at me then, eyes bright and colorless
in the alien light of the radio, and says
“Why I let them fuck me.”