anonymous
In the broken room
In a broken room
a man my ex just-knows fucks my 14-year-old daughter
the one I carried piggyback giggling and squealing in her dolly dress
through the living room and into the backyard at her 5th birthday party.
In merry-go-round rooms I talk for days
with police and lawyers
therapists and psychiatrists
counselors and social workers
teachers and principals
doctors and intake personnel
and administrators of institutions
behind neat brick walls with
cameras bolted at the doors and red button buzzers to let you in.
I have become a Christ on a glass cross.
In the carnival room at the sentencing where the monster gets 8 years in state prison
I tell the judge there can be no justice because another monster is forested
green and cold
living in her mother’s house two states away by a pleasant river beneath white hills while
my daughters carve their thighs and wrists like tree trunks
but not their names
to feel the untellable,
phoning their own monster to giggle with her about prom dresses I shall buy while
I am left alone to pick up bits of past lives I stumble upon,
as if they were pieces of a disjointed toy from that 5th birthday party,
study it to see if I can determine what it is for,
where it might fit. It will never fit.
Now in the broken room I bring you your pills, my daughters, at night.
My bedtime stories are lies I now tell myself by my own dear lamp.
In my broken room I sit and weep and wake up crying with clear tears
this room is mine, floorless and doorless
with a window, an amber block
tight-filled in my fragmenting skull,
outside under the peeling-away bone-sky
shapes like trees, walking, in this cracked room
I’m sitting on a bed and the bed is growing limbs.