My Whole Life

How I Prepared for a Poetry Reading
Domestic Violence Awareness Month, 2007

Crying in bed
Was just practice
for the tears they shed.

Dodging bullets was a drill
for weaving through a crowd
to stand before the one woman
I know wants to say something
but may not have the feet to walk.

I ate too much then for comfort.
I can work the room to dispense some,
skipping the cheese and crackers.

Worrying that he would kill us this time
prepared me to take into consideration
the fragile soul who is here somewhere.
I look around the room as I speak
and I spot her.

She is why I am here,
why after the journaling and the therapy
and the hunting for a peaceful spot
to live out the life I have created that
I came out three times this month
to speak before a crowd,
not my favorite Saturday pastime.

She does not write poetry
or hides it at home if she does.
People think she is ok.
She is a great employee.
She brings cake to the sick.
She laughs like anyone else,
but inside there is a crime scene
where soul murder has taken place.

See right there, the fast swallowing,
her eyebrows flicker when I talk about his hands.
She won’t fidget, but I see.
I know the signs from the inside out.

She is why I am here.
My whole life has prepared me
to speak to her.
Despite it all, I made it here,
loud mouth intact, still laughing,
thriving in my chosen spot,
never afraid to lay my head.
It was almost worth it.
Today, here, safe and whole
I can see there is more healing to do
and it is not mine this time.

The Woman in the Parking Lot
After Poetry Therapy

I can’t say
the things you say,
but they are true for me.

I had an un…
The words catch in her throat.

I had an uncle, too.
I don’t know how you do it.
Don’t stop, we need you.

And bright tears spill
out of her
onto the asphalt.

Can I hug you?

Always ask if they don’t.
Always ask.
Because they were tampered with,
bothered, touched, hurt,
all the euphemisms for soul murder,
so ask first.

And I do hug her and she
smells like hope and fear,
feels like promise and despair.

She will be skittish now.
She has said what she has not
to anyone else alive.
(three of us in this secret now)
I will be her first.

Don’t stop. We need you.

I do it for me and for you,
you know.
Once I couldn’t speak

but I wrote poems, lots of poems.
You keep writing, too.

No More Valentines, Please (a prose poem)

The color could be covered, but the swelling could not. She is a lumpy woman; bumps on her head and sags at her hips, the one from him directly, the other from him through his kids. His kids, they are, even without his taglines on them. She is the page for his byline. Some writer, he, inscribing lines across her cheekbones. His generous use of punctuation leaves the reader with no doubt as to where the limits lay.

He loved her thoroughly yesterday, declaring it so in a long hail of sonnets ended with the most exquisite haiku. Something about “tiny pearl teeth”, she just can’t remember now exactly what. That happens more now. His words escape her mind. She drifts about, his muse. It is only when she undresses that she is able to read his love notes. Down her arm, inner thigh, circling umbilicus. The special poem he inscribed deep, deep inside where the pink of her bears witness to his first valentine. He cut it out himself with the knife he keeps in his right front pocket.