Read an Excerpt
1.
Perhaps
this is what it feels like
to be a woman
who is also a vulture. To be
a vulture
who is a woman
with a broken wing.
To have been
cared for by a mother.
To have hatched.
To have been featherless
as a girl. To have been
fed the death
of someone else
by a mother
in a nest. And then
to have grown feathers. To
have been sent out
on her own. Not
to have wanted to go.
But to have flown.
To have
already known
the scent so well
she could smell it
as herself.
3.
My silk scar
I mean my silk
scarf—although
I wore no scarf.
It was summer
behind the indoor
high school swimming pool
on the other side of the parking lot.
He knocked me off my bike. (I don’t remember this, but it was in
the paperwork, which I kept for decades in a folder in a closet until
I asked my husband to burn it
for me, and I know he did because I watched him from the kitchen
window and saw the ashes on the sleeves of his jacket when he came back in.)
The frame was bent.
My bike.
A Schwinn.
Emerald green.
I think I had a towel
in a basket between
its handle bars.
He knocked me off.
The frame was bent.
(I don’t remember this.)
A neighbor fixed it for me, but if
I ever saw that bike again, I also don’t remember this. But I do
remember my father, how
we’d hear him in the bathroom after that and how it sounded as if he wept for all
the world-without-him-in-it, which one
day the world would be: he
loved me so.
And my mother woke me up
to tell me it was time for swimming lessons again.
Yes, I got raped, but, I
still had to learn how to swim.
I could show you where it happened, but what I wish —
(stanza break)
what I wish is I could let you see the light that day
the way I did:
that light lasted only half an hour or so, I suppose, but
afterward it lasted my whole life. Whenever
I want to see it I just close my eyes, and then
it pours all over me
in tubs and buckets and trunks of light emptied all at once
all over what was just (in my case) some
eleven-year old girl who’d stumbled
into a convenience store
where a boy I never saw before
or again
left the register, locked
the door, told me to sit down on the floor while he called—
I don’t remember this, but I remember (will. not forget) that
he asked me what my favorite flavor was before he got me some-
thing cold to drink, for free—with a straw, because
it was broken, my jaw, which
I remember now and then
when I bite into an apple or open
my mouth too wide
to yawn. Now, just
that flavor is a secret I’ll never
tell anyone
again. What it was. What it still is. It’s
sacred, that secret and what I tasted then, behind the locked
door of the convenience
store, on the other side of the high school’s indoor swimming pool
across from the parking lot
where he told me to shut up, and I still (I don’t know why) didn’t.
I asked if I was dead or going to die.
“No,” the boy said. “It’s not deep, the cut, but you’ll need stitches.”
And he was right, unlike my rapist, who told me he was
killing me, and then that I was dying
while he cut me with his little knife—superficially—a word
I doubt I knew the definition of back then, but which
I’ve grown to know the meaning of a little
better every year I go on living. This
death of mine, it took a doctor only seven stitches
to sew it
(stanza break)
into me again. And
with such precision! Now
I have only
this silk scar.
My rapist
never touched my scarf
because I wore no scarf.
My rapist
raped me, and he
didn’t get
away with it.
Excerpt from 4.
She asked me, “Did you cry then?”
when I cut that onion—all
its vulnerability, and nakedness, and the silence
with which it allowed itself to be
sliced into slivery ribbons, so
easily separated from, and collapsing
away from
the center to which it had been
mindlessly and comfortably attached
since the beginning, and then
its pale, watery juice, how it
pooled around the halved bulb of it, which
had begun in winter, in the darkness, underground, in
a garden—expanding, gradually, into
rings, and into ringlets, and how
these grew larger and wider as they labored to hide
the sentiment
at the center of it, until
they were a singularity, finally, until
the whole of it was veiled, and vague, made
ambiguous by a parchment gown, that
bit of modesty
the world had left to it, like
the papery thing a gynecologist
might drape over your spread legs
before peering into
the secrets hidden between them. Its
not for nothing, that little
comfort, offered—which
you must accept when you are offered it—meant
to help you feel
cared for, so that you might
imagine yourself shielded while
you wait to be yanked
out of the earth by your hair
and then your singularity, cut in half, and then
in half again, and then in half again, and then—the tears, the paper gown
fallen on the floor, the knife
I held, pressed
into myself, she asked me, “Did you cry then?”
“No,” I said.
“No tears at all?” —until
nothing was left, until the nothingness was what was left, and we
were happy to have it, and
we both knew was it was for, and we
knew it was the reason for everything else
and always had been—
the high heels, the make-up, the pantyhose, the poems—
