DFA Writes

Wrap and secure isolation.

Everything is illuminated.

Sight.

Touch.

Sound.

Take my eyes.

Strain my ears.

You release my demons, crawlers, poisoned mouthed murderers.

 

A single string of fairy lights hung low from the ceiling. I was laying on the ground, the back of my head pressed onto rugged asphalt causing blue and black bruises to spread across my skull. The lights brushed against my nose. Pink, yellow, red, and blue. Through the gaps of my swollen eye lids and latticed lashes I sensed the whir of the bulging lights.

 

We met on aisle six. The canned goods aisle. I glanced sideways at his bulky figure as he examined a metal cylinder labeled “soup.” He was obviously out of his element. No doubt he was the type of man who had never been passed the hardware section in his life. He thrust the can back into it’s original place with such force that a cascade of preserved delicacies toppled to the ground.

“Damn!”he yelled. With a glance he noticed me, wide mouthed. “Oh. Uh. Excuse my French.”

“Not at all,” I said, bending down to help him collect the bent cans. “I’ve been known to say worse.”

A smile.

He asked to see me again. He was a doctor, like all the handsome 32-year-olds I had imagined late at night. He phoned me the next morning and he rescued me from my home that night.

 

I wheezed in a deep breath. Nothing but pain filled my lungs and chest. Slowly I rolled my head to the right. How long had I been here? Minutes, hours, days? Blood pounded in my ears. It was warm silence. Dull and thumping through the arteries of my brain. Suddenly, an eruption of sound disrupted my fuzzy peace. It increased with intensity until it became a high pitched screech of anger; of exposure. I knew he hated me.

 

He had told me he loved me, that he wanted to prove his love to me. I forced myself to believe he wouldn’t hurt me. I loved him desperately. I yearned for the watch of his kind eyes and brilliant smile.

We made love twice. That’s all it took for me to know. I knew that I wanted him to love me forever, to hold me forever. I had plans. Plans for our long life together. We would travel to somewhere far away, Vietnam, Burma, or Korea, and start a hospital in the lush landscape of Asia where people would flock from all over to be cured by the skilled hands of my doctor. I had heard of these places only in the hundreds of books I had read. It was a beautiful dream. A dream only girls with naive fantasies create.

“I want to run away with you,” I confessed to him while he drove me home one night.

“And why would you want to do that?” he asked me, turning his huge BMW into my street.

“I…I don’t know. I guess it’s because I love you. And you love me?”

He was silent. He must have been concentrating. I didn’t ask him again.

 

I couldn’t take it anymore. The screams of agony were deafening. My eyes snapped open. The lights dangled dancing in the chilly air of winter. Three lights had burnt out. Died from the extended time they’d had to flicker. I took a breath and held the air until there was nothing left. Silence. I was alone.

 

The doctor had watched me balloon yet said nothing. He knew. I expanded around the middle, my lightly tanned skin developing white stretches like old leather.

“You’re pregnant.” he said.

“I know.” I replied.

He mumbled obscenities.

 

I cried out for my doctor. Silence. The warm, tickling heat of sobs crawled up my throat but the tears wouldn’t come. I was abandoned. I placed my hands across my belly and pressed roughly against my sore abdomen. I was battered and broken. Where had he gone?

 

I sat in the church parking lot a block from my house. This was where we had always met. My bulbous frame cast a long shadow on the newly poured concrete. It was midnight but the lot was lit up by strings of lights from Christmas parties. He had said that he had some news to tell me. He had whispered that he loved me on the phone.

No doubt this was the night he would take me away. I could already feel the heat of the Burmese sun across my face. I was excited and frightened.

 

I rocked onto my hands and forced myself to stand. I wouldn’t believe that he had left me alone and hurt. I couldn’t believe it. Through my dry and blurry eyes I scanned the asphalt. Nothing. No car, no one, nothing. Tears glided down my cheeks dropping onto the blood I had left on the ground. My feet dragged and I stumbled across the black rock. I gave up. My legs buckled and I gladly fell to the solidness of Earth.

 

My smile faded. He lit a cigarette and blew a puff into my face.

“Well? What do you think?”

I pressed my eyes together and rested my hands on the hardness of my stomach.

“Come on. I don’t have all day. They need an answer.”

I sniffed in the cold air through my nose. I couldn’t abandon it. Not our child. It wasn’t theirs to take away from me.

“You promised that we’d be together. A family. You, me, and the baby. I thought-”

“You thought wrong. That’s your problem. You don’t think. That’s why you got yourself into this mess. You only have yourself to blame. I can’t believe I actually pitied you.” he blew another smoke ring into my damp face.

I bawled, sobbed, threw myself on the ground and wailed like a child.

“I….just….” I gasped, tightening my abdominal muscles. He stared at me. Throwing down his cigarette, he waited for my next spurt of agony.

The doctor delivered our baby. He told me there was no place to take me. I asked about the hospital but he said he couldn’t risk going to jail or getting a divorce from his wife. He said people didn’t take too kindly to a doctor with a 14-year-old mistress.

 

I turned over and lay again on my back. The long strand of fairy lights twinkled in the early morning darkness. My arms and legs lay sprawled on the ground, my body positioned in the shape of an X. I was alone. My son ripped from me. He had taken him to those people. A sudden bang and the lights flickered off. I felt a smile stretch across my beaten face. I would wait for him. I loved him. I desperately loved him.

It was a cold room. Colourless but for  one picture anchored to the white wall by the points of four metal tipped pins.  A aolitary carpet lay motionless on the vast wooden floor. Its black curves and pure white corners waiting patiently to be molested by the feet of pedestrians.  Stretching to the ceiling rose the four posts of an unnaturally large and buldging bed. The black metal bent in odd, petruding angles which often clinked agains the chain of an ever cirlcing fan protruding from the ceiling. It was the only sign of life in that frozen room.  That silent place whose corners were polished until they formed soft curves of erosion.

They used to tell me in that highschool class,which I dreaded attending day after day,

That that particular lesson held the key to unlocking my soon to be everyday.

I never believed them.

Never understood why a perfect circle could help me to care for the damned and broken.

Or how the Pythagorean theorum could make me a pure sould.

And why it was so important for me to find that constant line passing through the intercepts of X and Y.

You taught me.

You taught me that X and Y are woman and man

Two seperate points both solutions to the same problem.

That by these being connected we achieved straight constant perfection.

You made me yearn for the numbers and calculations.

Made me achieve a downward slope into the endless equation of our love.

With your personal numbers.

Your,”Baby, you’re my only 1.”

and,”I want 2 be with you.”

and,”I’ll hold you 4ever.”

But your numbers weren’t real.

Not whole, rational or irrational.

They were miscalculated.

It seems that you were a fraction of a human being,

Never fully accepting you other half to become a complete picture.

You taught me.

You reminded me why I had always hated math.

Why is was so useless to me.

Why I left it and you to echo in the hallways of highschool.

I am from the red haired giants

Who rejected the clean marble columns for palaces of broken twigs.

Where crooked backed monarchs and white toothed princes are not just for Cinderella.

I am from the blood soaked into the soil after the clashing of iron weapons

Cries calling out to mother from metal men and boys.

I am from a place where the streets are paved in… cement….

But the homes are all gold plated.

I am from where a cup of tea cures everything and a biscuit is salvation.

I am from fingers ripped off from the hands of tiny boys and girls because the economy needs textiles not education.

I am from men who changed religion and women who wore the accessories to match.

I am from a place where a stage is the world and every word said is pure poetry.

I am from religious vengeance of:

Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism from times before the fall of the twin towers when I was deceived

By government

But not one I had created and birthed.

I am not where I am from.

Where I’m from is not where I am.

 

A place purely stifling.

A place that constricts my lungs and begs me to accept it as my own.

Which will not let me out but will not let me in.

I am in a place where God’s word can only be found in church and the minister.

Where “Alleluia!” and “Praise Jesus!” are the only things that make me a girl worthy of their sons.

Where the history is gone.

Where my history is gone.

Where they neglect my culture but call it their own.

I am from the beginning.

I am in the end.

She wants to balance

To breathe

Resenting the subordination inflicted by him

He wants to spin

Spin out of his world

His life

His pathetic plane of existance

They wanted to shape

To arch their necks in crooked poses

Free yet shackled by physical boundries

They hated

The long chains connecting the slim ankles

Withered by ages of matrimony

Sticks

broken by

uprooted parents from centuries past

For Christ they were removed from home to newer, colder soil

Surrounded by those nightmarish faces of demons.

Their fear and death will serve the Lord.