and was forced

to sell the building

where he did what he did.

I’ll tell him karma is a hell

of a feminist.

I’ll tell him my silence

was his worst bet.

I’ll tell him I’m watching

him through the bullet hole

he left in my childhood,

and if he comes within

two hundred miles

of a child’s trust, my body

will start bleeding his name

all over Main Street in his middle-

of-somewhere town.

I’ll tell him

he’s the middle of nowhere:

a man with no stop

lights, the kind of place kids grow up

desperate to escape. I’ll tell him

as soon as I got out,

I imagined him sanding off

his fingerprints, the guilt

filing him down to half his size.

When I met him,

he was the biggest man

in town, had set records

in the deadlift, was as old

as my father. I weighed

ninety-six pounds, was still

spending sleepovers practicing

how to kiss. I’ll tell him how big

I am now. So big

I could make his address

the title of my next book,

and yes, I think he asked for it.

Asked me to play hangman

with his name on the local news,

asked me to spray paint ME TOO

across his pickup truck

and say, I dare you

to compare property damage

with someone you made property.

With someone whose puberty

you mutilated.

I’ll say, Trauma

is a pretty word for how to die

every day of the year,

but my voice is alive

and right now it is the only justice

system I trust

to ensure men like you

understand the law

of gravity, understand

you will always be held down

by what you held down.

There is no such thing as rising

from someone else’s ashes.

No man’s spirit escapes the hell

he denies putting a child through,

which is to say, I am the only one

out of the two of us who survived

you, and I survived you

so beautifully. Even on my worst days,

my scars are the backroads

where kids sneak out their windows

and drive through the night

to hear poetry. I am so much

of who I dreamed I’d be

when I grew up, and what

does the boy you once were

think of the man you became?

A man running

from his own name.

A man who must wake

fifty times a night, terrified

the truth is somewhere breaking

from its chains and racing

for the world’s ear.

When the truth gets there, will you try

to tell your friends I wanted it?

Will you try to tell your wife

how old of a soul I was?

At thirteen? At thirteen,

I had the youngest soul

in the universe.

I was so brand new

I thought reincarnation

was a flower I would wear

on my wrist

if someday someone asked me

to the ninth-grade dance.

I’d stand in my full-length mirror

and practice not blushing

when a slow song came on.

That’s how old I was.