Ones Who Got Away With It

 

 

I still fantasize that I can do something about it.

That girl in the outpatient-care-facility for teenagers

confided in me that she snuck out to see a guy, much older

at his frat party, and he forced her on his three friends, to have a taste,

when he was done. “Is it supposed

to hurt so much?” She whispered to me——

“I mean, for this long after?”

She was severely bulimic and we both

hated our mothers. The next day I said, We should tell someone.

And she said, “I’ve talked it over with my best friend

and she says I should be proud of it.”

She was thirteen and I was sixteen. She looked up to me

as I recovered from my first time succeeding

at death-defying thoughts, streaking

across the house, and out into the yard, mom

chasing after, roaring “Why are you doing this to me!?”

like something out of a Marx Brother’s outtake,

darkly impersonating our killers, our dumb luck,

with our hysterical self-preservation, our inherited loneliness——

 

But dammit I hope that girl’s doing well. I hope she can keep food down

and it’s nourishing her, her cells cheering like parents

in the stands of a game, even if those men still exist——important men,

I imagine. Men who run conglomerates and have well-to-do families.

Or maybe men I see every day at work

or whose books I read.

And how am I here

with my little life intact——and mom’s too,

for the most part; or that my fern thrives on the windowsill

far away from those rooms overlooking Route 7

and the grain silos. I’m painful to the touch only

when I don’t light a candle and praise oblivion.

I’d slid-shut my teenage-self’s veranda doors

and stepped out onto the world’s fancy balconies

and was prepared to do something drastic

like live and live and live.