Aftermath

AFTERMATH

The night you planted the bomb I mistook it for flowers.

The smell of affection like silk on my neck,
the curve of my spine a glass vase,
our bouquet of hair,
an odd number falling against each other,
and each piece of clothing stacked against the balance of our nature
so we lessened the weight,
broke from our bases,
I thought
we might spin
in the wind.

I did not spin.
I was not beautiful.
The mattress, sunken and unloved,
thought my bud too sweet to pass,
so it held me hostage in its shallow arms
as you laid me like something exotic to be picked,
something rare to be pressed between you.
Perhaps you saw something in me you wanted to keep.
Perhaps you saw something in me you wanted to take.

I didn’t remember how you took it.

But you followed me.
Years later,
in the birth wing of the hospital where every day is a miracle,
in my room made to look like a home
with laminate cabinets,
with sterile sheets and
law and order
and saltine crackers,
and my lover,
who is waiting for his son to come like a drink in his desert soul.

You crackpot gardener,
you are no one, you are nowhere,
but you got here, doctor’s hand inside me,
checking my cervix and then it is yours,
reaching too deep, too quick, too long, too many times.

I am a dozen roses tied at the waist with barbed wire, I am mid-thrash, in a storm of blood petals, I am no glass vase, just a tornado of shards
and I am cut, years are cut, tongues are cut,
eyelid cut hair locks cut ribs cut cunt cut

I can’t let a baby through this, this aftermath,
this destruction, this city leveled, this ash globe,
where nothing, not a person, not a plant, survives.

I didn’t remember how you took it,
how you traded, how you left something to tick inside me,
to teach my son the sound an enemy makes as he crawls across lines,
to teach my body your sergeants, your manifesto, your anger,
your gloved hands on a seed shaped grenade you
threw into that field of flowers.

The doctors worked for hours,
my baby stubbornly surrendering inside me,
i had to coax him,
had to coax us,
had to lift this broken burning house off of me,
pull my stomach from the rubble.
I smeared my tears into war paint.
I dropped my shield,
let it clank against my baby’s father’s
as they locked.
And against all odds
I slowly opened my petals,
faced the emerging sky,
so bright it paralyzed us.

And it was not you.
It was him,
it was the sun.