Recently, my rapist flew into the room like a Pan Am pilot,
served low-country boil with
a colonizer’s smirk—
chicken wings served up with a guttery drip
of involuntary weeping. No one minds
a gulping rapist. I cried myself
radioactive, dismal steel—
peacocks of pain! My rapist
multiplied into two teenagers in a dorm room
picked clean of lies, but they
soon grew awkward, bored.
But, my rapes keep making it through the day!
One boyfriend on a film channel reality show—
night-blue horror, jolting my slumbering mannequin
into brackish armor.
My cousin told me about the boys
who pulled her off her skateboard, failed
as she slipped away on foot, never got the chance
to rob a life, stick a bullet in her spine—
and she still had to see them
in school, opening their math books.
Don’t look away. It’s one of your favorites.
Supermarket parking lots, conferences,
dinner parties with their girlfriends,
wives—brocade in their ceremony.
Rapes are nothing like spooky hedges.
My rapists had money, college, and eventually,
wee children to protect
against the world’s rapists.
My last rapist was still blossoming
just after the first tree dropped its inaugural petals
into spring’s spiked jowls.
None of my rapists have ever heard me sing.
None of my rapists were able to crawl inside
my cabbage heart unfurling. I regenerated,
which takes real power, to rise
slick with residue birth—
in the dark,
to be the Volta—to forgive
the stars’ fetal rage for their weakness.