This house is green and so am I, my skin fading to the moss that crept out from the forest paths into our yard. My mind is frozen like a tree, where it’s not frozen but it is still, standing in one place for six years, sixty years, no need for feet because they’d be under the ground anyway. I’m writing but I’m thinking about sitting on the ground, on this stone path between trees that are on the wrong continent but haven’t noticed, except the banana tree that cracked the ceiling with its fingers, unfolding leaves into the February air–there are no seasons like this at home.
Today my mind wanders to rape and stays there
or it doesn’t have to wander
because that’s where it lives–in the hand of the man
whose fingers cupped mine on the bus yesterday,
in the hard jawline of the man
who followed me home, his saliva
foaming around the word “beautiful.”
This doesn’t make me beautiful.
I don’t feel beautiful.
I feel like a dead fish, mouth and eyes gaped open, skin wet and pale, imagine his knife unzipping my belly, fingers inside. My body already knows what a stranger’s hands feel like, already knows how to split open on command, already knows what it means when a man on the street spits “beautiful” at it. I brace against the hot summer air and prepare for my death, back down into myself and shut my eyes, back away from my body, not saying “yours” or “mine,” nowhere to hide but inside.
I wonder if my rapists are thinking about me right now. I wonder if this man is thinking about me right now, is waiting in the parking lot outside our apartment, scanning the horizon for my body. I want to be remembered. I want to be forgotten. I want to be alone for one moment of my life, with no voice in my head but my own, burn their fingerprints from my thighs, scrub their sweat and spit and words from the grain of my flesh, have one moment of
clean
one moment of me, of silence. I woke at 4:30 this morning to men’s voices echoing against the walls of my room. I pulled myself from the warmth of my blankets and peeled aside the closet door, searching for eyes or knives glowing in the dark. I turned on the hall light, shading my face from its harshness, checked the front door lock twice, listened for Lindsey’s breathing at her door, watched the parking lot for forty-five minutes for any hint of movement, waited for the sun to lick the horizon, and still I couldn’t fall back asleep.
My dreams are rotting with the stench of their presence, these men I’ve only met once but become ghosts passing daily through my heart and throat. Every day my bones ache, and I don’t know if this pain is me or if it’s their footprints still heavy on my skeleton, the entire frame of me bruised and laced with cracks as thin as spider webs, strands of silk catching everything with wings, tangling more and more the harder we try to fly. On days like this I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the sun, if I’m a moth with skin like ash throwing itself back and forth beneath a streetlight, shadow bigger than body always on the ground.
Everyone who walks below me chokes.
No one ever looks up.
jenny did it 