Fold the Shadows

CW: Sexual Assault

Yes, at first, I tried brevity,
used contractions, looked
for substitutions of formal

constructions. Won’t replaced
maybe after the night a stranger
split me, when I curled small

in my Honda. Words like shouldn’t
squatted, & I refused to abandon
them. Years passed. On a mission,

I truncated my expressions—
I added can’t & didn’t to won’t.
My shortcomings added up;

they elongated my mother’s
drawling disapproval. No one
listened. A witchy chorus

of skeptics hovered on broomsticks.
Why should someone believe
me, anyway? Midnight tonight

in a desolate meadow. In the distance,
orange groves burn. I study moths
with fellow lepidopterists. A kid

asks, What gives us value? Is it breath?
Or goodwill? He watches me tend
to a grey insect struggling

in the confines of its thin net,
scrapping through the early
morning flashlight penumbras,

tugged toward death. Oh, the magnetism
of demise—it’s irresistible tonight.
Those long-leaf pines slash their own

shadows. Yet still, I battle elisions
that lurk in gravitas, & I employ
diction no one gets. Words

like victim transcend this page turn’s
tectonics. I still possess power,
but I’m diminished to bulges & bad

knees. I can summon a summer
night from memory, weave spells
that hearken back to the evil taste

of a .45 on my tongue. I conjure
ruin out of nothing when nothing pleats
spectral places, those ensorcelled

hours when slavering devils howl
toward morning. With my old-fangled
magic, I’m self-destructs to I am  

not. Chilling verbs act & wink
& flirt & force & command.
They slide over from the passenger

seat, & the phantom of my rapist
uncrimps. There’s no trick to forgetting
terror, to losing that midnight,

that time I lay prone on my vinyl
backseat, inhaling my attacker’s
four-day-old scent. The shortest

complete sentence in the English
language never chases away
the horror or my mother’s shame.

No.