Content Warning: Rape
V.
The TV blares; we are watching some episode of the Star Wars saga.
Your arms around me making slight impressions upon the seran wrap
Bundling me in its dullness.
I stare blankly, wondering if you feel as far from me as I do from you
Caught in the riptide of reality, clawing at the shore, at your skin.
For you are translated--broken into millions of pieces, millions of words,
Reassembled. I can run my fingers along the seams,
Hoping and not hoping you shatter.
Love is a perversion of the Rape of the Sabine Women--
When now, where now, will you carry me away
And defile me?
Poisoning me with the saliva of your kiss,
Strangling me with hands that caress.
I am parlyzed by the fascination of your sudden transformation,
Your eyes unhearing, your ears unseeing
Something so grotesque about your disinterest
That your plots can take the form of nothing.
Unsafe, afraid, yet living dangerously--
How can I begin to understand my love for you,
But to run far away
And fast.
VIII.
Sometimes I won’t know who you are,
Even though I’ve made you dinner
And written you love letters.
I haven’t the best memory
Since I took 400-some volts to the brain
And awoke a new woman,
Mind too withered for despair,
Some gothic tale of crooked reanimation
Of a corpse that knew at least how to love.
In another life, I wouldn’t see the contours of death in your face,
When the light is a certain angle
And the breeze a certain direction
So suddenly you are not who you say you are,
But a fragment of time severed by the things they call therapy.
A disembodied figure bearing no resemblance to you
Stuffing me like a hunting trophy
In the cold, hard, unforgiving light of a winter afternoon.
Somehow floats in and out of you
As wires cross and sizzle, memories collide.
I want you to tell me that it’s not okay;
Get angry, tell me I’m fucked-up;
But instead you don’t let go of me
As I cry
And cry
And cry
And I don’t know how I should fear you:
I am but a breath away
From loving my rapist.
There are millions of ways to say that I’m sorry,
But you will hear none of them
You condemn me to an intrinsic forgiveness I do not deserve.
IX.
There’s ocean on my face,
Icy, pungent with decay.
It is a place I have been long ago
Probably as a child,
maybe a little older than that.
The colors have run with time,
Leaving just the slightest blush of pastel
To tell the sea from sky.
The stone church I once knew that stood by the shore
Has tumbled into mossy ruins;
Church bells still warble with the wind.
The picture ends with the memory;
No more to take, no more to give.
But a brain in a jar,
Pulsing in cycles;
Keeping a broken conscience alive.
If I don’t move my limbs,
I won’t feel the bleach-stiff sheets brush my skin.
Stuck in a Hopper painting behind a window,
So frosted over, you can’t see tomorrow.
Just
Wake, swallow, let them have your blood,
Eat, swallow, close your eyes again,
All the while
Swaddled in the shock of cold air and sea
In a place where they can’t touch you.
By Kaitlin Kan.
