Hung family portraits

watched your mother for years

sag like an old coat at the sound

of the slamming door.

I never saw him hit her

but in our two-year relationship,

I helped clean up three broken chairs,

four pictures frames, sixteen dishes.

People say, when you marry someone,

you marry their family.

We were barely sixteen, unripe fruit

not ready to be picked, peeled.

I loved you head over handles

like my first bicycle accident –

before the mouthful of gravel and blood,

I swore we were flying.

You were so many firsts:

first boyfriend,

first hand holding mine in the hallways,

first three-hour phone call,

first time to pick a boy over my friends,

first person to see me naked,

bare and fresh as a plate of clay,

first river of fingers,

first fistful of hair,

first time to pick a boy over my family,

first time my body was a scale,

you had so much weight.

Do you remember the drive in?

Your sister in the front seat asks you

to quit shaking your leg without looking back.

I am dry. Your fingers are fish out of water,

flopping and desperate.

You do not stop.

You never hit me

but in our two-year relationship,

you took so much of me in your mouth.

Foreplay was an argument with the ceiling fan.

Your father’s voice vibrating up the stairs

Compromise was turning off the lights.

Your mother sitting in silence, my legs

tacked destinations on your map.

Do you remember

the school dance? Outside the cafeteria,

I am pinned like a corsage.

Pressed against the lockers

as if you were the traffic

I am about to run into.

You shake me; tell me

you love me so damn hard.

People say, when you marry someone,

you marry their family.

Was that your father

fingering me on couch in front of your siblings?

Was he the one who made you ignore the no’s,

to slide them under the pillow with your hands?

Were they his hands, making the wallpaper

of my skin flinch? Is this where

the cycle of abuse found you,

as the picture frames looked away.

I still worry about your mother,

imagine her crumpled like a rag on the floor,

a handful of shattered china, her silence

a familiar taste in my throat.

Journal Entry

My life is slowing slipping into summer. I have worn the same tank top for 4 days in a row, I take lukewarm showers; I sweat behind my knees and between my elbows.

Today, it is 90 degrees and the winds are up to 45 miles per hour. It feels like the ocean is everywhere in Minnesota.

Acknowledgements