I dissociate.  I am not a prepubescent girl being molested.  I am not a woman being raped.  I am a steady, calm voice.  I am large and empowered.  I draw my breath to bring my shoulders squarely down from my ears.  I look for ground to claim within my mind.  Here.  Here is ground where I can summon my breath, summon my words, summon my body and either demand or burn your unwelcome dick out of me.  I will my eyelids open.  I find your eyes and hold your distant gaze.  I imagine strength and steadiness into my voice as I say, “You are going to stop.  I do not want to fuck so you are going to stop.”

“Baby,” you say with your dick still inside of me.  “Baby, you wanted it.”  

Ten years ago was the first Thanksgiving since Dad died.  I know we went to someone’s home, but I do not remember whose.  I know we smiled without feeling warm.  We prayed without believing.  We ended up at a Waffle House because there is no correct thing to do when it is Thanksgiving and your father is dead by means that are both intimately familiar and disastrously mysterious.  

I remember details that are irrelevant.  The Waffle House was startlingly clean.  I ate a pecan waffle.  We sat at the bar, perhaps so that we didn’t have to look each other in the eye.  The man who sat next to me was bald.

I remember details that are bizarre.  One waiter sexually harassed a co-worker, or at least it seemed that way to me.  The co-worker’s tooth fell out.  She was bleeding everywhere and trying to keep up with orders for smothered and covered hash browns at the same time.  I wanted to tell her to put her tooth in a glass of milk.  Isn’t that what you are supposed to do with a tooth?  

You cannot predict the way each first will feel, but you might feel warm and almost spiritual when the bizarreness of the first Thanksgiving without your father is reflected in the oddity that is Waffle House waitresses.

I haven’t seen you in two years.  We’re sitting across the table from each other, sharing sushi.  You lean in and say to me, “Sometimes I want to jump off of a cliff.  Just to see what happens.”  My eyes get wide.  I grin at you and say, “Sometimes when I’m in a crowd of hushed people, I want to scream.  Just to see what happens.”  Your eyes get wide.  We fall into loud laughter.

We’re in front of the feminist bookstore.  I parked my car next to the ramp so that my friend who is in a wheelchair doesn’t have to roll far and my other friend who walks with braces doesn’t have to walk far.  He gets in the front seat.  I close the door and put his wheelchair into my trunk, my joints popping angrily at me as I do.  I look at my other friend and his braces.  ”You should name them,” I say as if it’s a fun joke.  ”Do you name your arms?” he asks me.

I would go to his bed late at night and leave before the sun tried to rise.  He didn’t know where my home was, where I came from or where I was going.

You can’t catch a feral cat, he told me.  You might be able to seduce her into being fine and cuddly for a time.  You might have the chance to breathe in a half-surrender.

On occasion, I would allow myself to rest in him and in the space of ceded control.  While I kept my hands in the places he asked of me, I would stretch my back out for him.  I whimpered under his touch.

Something would inevitably strike her the wrong way.  She would scratch the hell out of him and run off.

He tried to be good and gentle with me, but he always walked me to the door and always asked when he would see me again.  He always watched me go.  I felt as though he was gate keeping the door of my departure.  I felt like a caged animal who was allowed to leave only under the discretion of a caretaker.  I despised him for that.

You know she’s there, but she’s running wild eyed through the night and you can’t touch her.

I went to his bed less often.  There were moments of comfort that I collected, but I grew claustrophobic in his bed.  On the full moon, I ran without considering whether I should keep running.

The day I told him I would never return to him, a hawk escaped from the nearby zoo.  This is all true.

I feel immobile.  ”Are you dressed?  To your shoes?”

I am too far behind.  ”Progress, not perfection.”

It reminds me of another first time.  It reminds me of being tied to his bed, face down while he ran his fingers and his dick over my back and my ass.  I barely made a sound as I felt the rush of my hesitations falling off with each thrust.  That was our last quiet fuck.

It’s Thursday night and I’m walking toward a closed intersection at a protest.  I take my time studying your ass and the almost silly yellow marshall stash across your shoulder.  A little closer and I’m studying your hands, your lips, the past-life maybe cancerous spot above your lip.  Later in the evening you’ve somehow managed to find your way to my red couch.  I’m trying to keep my mind on the time and the cats, but I have a lustful mind full of wandering thoughts.  I can’t decide if I want to be wrestled down to the floor or lay my head the the crook of your arm.

It’s Friday night and I am on the floor, leaning over puzzle pieces with a friend.  I take my time studying the space between us.  You are sitting in a chair just next to our puzzling attempts.  I’m dressed as a sailor and keenly aware of how short my skirt is.  I want to look at you and the way you are looking at me, but I can barely manage to look at your boots.

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind 
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously, 
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.