the first time they said hello,
she was getting her body sewn
back shut from her stomach
to her heart, a straight line
up her torso like the directness
of her eulogy.
she could not hold him but she
waited for him anyway.
and she had been running,
running with her body swollen
with his horrible timing
and urgency, his strong will
and wanting to arrive
right that second
and she still remembers his shriek
tearing through the bloody air
and her own sigh of
hemorrhaged relief.and she still wonders, she does,
when this boy she birthed
from her adolescent body
barred his teeth and tore his flesh,
when he began to wear violence like a badge of honor,
when his fists began to take
after his father's,
when he began to smile like the nightmare she had
lived through just a mere hour before
and she smacked him, hard,
because she could not stand it.some nights he heard the hard smacks
and soft cries of his mother
being torn apart by an invisible man
and he rolled over in his bed.
his sister, patterned with bruises,
asked him what they should do,
and he said, "let him hit her."he was not always this way,
this cold and unfeeling—
at least he was not this way the first time they said hello.
he was just a premature baby,
supposed to have been born on
Leap Year but tore himself
into existence on
Christmas Eve instead.
he was a small boy with the same name as his father,
with curly brown hair and a big appetite and a desire
to break all his toys—
so perhaps he was always this way.ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
he loved his mother even though
she was too kind to him
and every night he let the
invisible man hit her.
she served him cereal with
warm milk, she bought him
new sneakers, she raised his baby,
she pulled him out of the fire
and cried over his lifeless body
and smacked him, hard, when she could not stand it.
and he smacked her hard, too,
when he decided the invisible man
was too kind and she
deserved more bruises, she
deserved more nightmares.her son, her only son, firstborn,
when she was fourteen and unwise
and believed she knew what she was getting herself into.
the first time they said hello,
and she held the small frail body
in her arms, she believed
she knew every molecule
making up this human being she
had (albeit accidentally) created.
but she did not, she knew not
one of his molecules,
not even the ones he tore
from her own existence.it's tragic, really, the way she
cannot stand to see it this way. somewhere back in apartment 514
they are still smacking each other hard,
the invisible man watching from his perch on the fire escape,
the patterned girl fighting with herself trying to help,
the fire sparking in the kitchen
like an unlikely witness. the flames flicker behind them, whispering
in the dark.
"what should we do?""let him hit her."
YOU ARE READING
seams and stitching ♡ published
Poetry"this is your kind of story. no one is the good guy-- no one is the bad guy-- the blame shifts from monster to monster and in this place everyone bares their teeth." [featured. highest ranking: #6 in poetry.]