Puppies

See, my lover kisses my knobbly knuckles and quirks his eyebrows in question,
and I open my mouth but cannot speak for fear 8 year old me will come out.
He says we don't have to talk about it and I am grateful
because the scars are illustrations of a series of stories that have conflated.
They stretch and sway til' they happened at the same place, simultaneously,
the white and red of my fathers fists punctuating each moment and they are pockmarked with him:
 
Watching through the window as his shadow grew specter strong and bent inward, body hungry,
and I swear to god I could hear her fingers breaking.
The clink of strangers belt buckle.
The grip on my wrist that wrapped twice around in navy blue and green,
the calloused fingers tracking a tale of bruises so quiet they could slip beneath my sleeves,
sidle up behind my teeth.

It's taken 12 years but I know why he wanted it that way now:

People passing wouldn't stop, wouldn't tilt their heads or pause in thought
whimpering is not the noise of children
but of misbehaving puppies.

I have spent twelve years shying from definitions, explaining him away in childhood spelling competitions:
schizophrenia, paranoia, sad, mad, bad, mean.
But it is here, in the arms of a man who knows the very limits of me,
that I find a grotesque honesty.

It was abuse. It was two years a hostage.
It was hide under the bed.
It was bullets in the bedside tablet and guns under the pillow slip.
It was knives and recording devices in the roof.
It was kidnapping.
It was kidnapping.
It was kidnapping.

My lover rubs at my fingers,
little circles to let me know he is waiting for me to come home,
little caresses to tell me its okay,
but it's not.

I was born into flames and all I learned was to keep burning until the oxygen was gone,
because when disaster comes its best to have your eyes shut,
it's best to be curled small in the cupboard with the ash sprinkled on your skin like
the hand prints I can't help but see
every single day.

I was raised in a war-zone where my knuckles were both
kevlar and artillery:
I am the remnants of every statistic that keeps you looking at your daughters,
wondering what stories they keep hiding beneath their soft-skin eyelids.  


My lover pulls me in, a come-back gesture,
but my daddy is at the window and in the room and under the bed and I am scared all over again
I am a child of fire, a woman of war, and I have grown strong and tall but
no-body taught me between rounds of gunfire and the black and bloody downpour of fists:

How do I build a home from these ashes,
with fingers crooked from stories
I am only just beginning to tell?