That’s the kind of man you were.

The kind of man who makes children

grow up and search

for your phone number,

our bodies riddled with the wish

that all the records will say:

No one by that name exists.

THE CALL, OPTION 2

I pay seventeen dollars online to track down the phone number of the man who sexually assaulted me, and my friend asks, “What do you plan to say?”

There is a world in which you did not touch me.

A world in which you thought about touching me

and were so nightmared by your own mind

you climbed inside your skull and bloodied your knees

crawling across the tundra of your history,

turning over every rock to chase out every worm

that might trick you into believing anything

could be cut in half and keep living.

There is a world in which you saw

how easily you could become an ax

splitting the personalities of children,

so swore your fingerprints

would be like the rings of trees, that your growth

could be counted on. In this world you have

groomed no one, and I am made of flyaways—

gleefully unclipped, wholly uncombed through,

braiding myself around a song, certain

I’ve invented dancing. Look at me

still calling you a hero. You built my trust

and never became the quake of earth

that shattered my foundation. Look at you

mothering your own nature, calling yourself home

at the first sign of dark. In this world you might

still be poor but not where it counts.

You might have still lost all your money,

but look at what you saved: Me

and Her and Her and Her and Her and Her

and the child you once were—how proud

he is to see who he’s become. In this world

you still have secrets, but they are like my father’s

secrets. The ones he doesn’t know I know.

The ones my grandma told me: how he stayed

home nearly every weekend of high school

to keep my grandfather’s drunken fist from the glass

of her jaw, how good my father was at pretending

he didn’t love the movies, hadn’t saved

all summer to buy a secondhand suit

for his first school dance. There is a world

in which you, too, only lie to save someone’s life,

a world where you still live a stone’s throw

from Canada but walk the river’s shore never plotting

how you’d swim to freedom, never practicing

the backstroke of denial, never hoping I drowned

the letters you wrote me when I was graduating

eighth grade and you were forty and marrying

someone you said would never be your type.

The first time I called, your wife answered

the phone. I hung up, not strong enough

to be like you—to throw a brick through

a woman’s chest and have no doubts about it

being the right move, but there is a world

in which the truth is as soft as the pillow

that holds your wife’s head when she dreams