(Trigger warning: domestic / sexual violence)
1.) He hit me with a slotted spoon because I had hiccups.
She made me feel the knot on the back of her head.
2.) He sold our baby to a man who makes movies
featuring (she could not think of the word: pedophilia) sex babies.
3.) He laughed as he drove over our dog and her newborn puppies,
over and over, as the kids screamed in the backseat.
I went home and hugged my dog all night.
4.) I’m now blind in my right eye. I can never have children.
When I hear a drill I have a panic attack,
so I had to quit my job at the shop.
I think when she saw the look on my face,
she knew I would not be able to listen
to her drill story. She actually hugged me
and told me everything would be okay.
5.) I lost my job due to the pandemic but he blamed me.
He drugged me asleep and set the apartment on fire.
I read about this online. They still haven’t caught him.
She jumps every time the front door opens.
She is sure he will find her here.
Can he?
Do any of these men find our clients here?
6.) I got caught shoplifting cigarettes for him.
That put me in the hospital for a week.
(I told her to not use passive voice,
to put the blame where it belongs.)
HE put me in the hospital for a week,
she said proudly,
showing me the empty darkness
where teeth had been
before the beating.
7.) He was voted Lawyer of the Year by his firm.
To celebrate, he got drunk and let his best friend from work
rape me on the floor of the garage.
I was raped by my roommates’ boyfriend.
I told her that. I have never told anyone that before.
She and I then sat, here in the office,
and just sat in silence until I had to go to class.
8.) He beat my mother after she tried to stop him
from stabbing me at a family reunion.
I really thought she was trying to be funny
and I laughed. Now she avoids me
whenever I work my shifts. I feel bad.
I’ve tried to apologize, but I don’t know
what to say or how to say it.
9.) His brother told me I shouldn’t marry him,
and it was even his good brother who said that,
not the one who had raped me.
I changed her bandages as we talked.
Her kids seemed to be in shock
but in the two days they’ve been here,
I’ve actually heard them all laugh a few times.
10.) Addendum
I broke up with my boyfriend earlier.
And I can’t work the overnight shift anymore.
This morning as I walked home, I was on the hill
and heard a noise behind me. Ended up
being a cat who walked with me a while.
But before that, before I saw the calico cat,
I thought it was a man, a monster, a violence
that had found me, followed me, that small noise
sent me into a panic and when I tried to
explain that to my boyfriend as I broke up
with him, and he laughed a little, he didn’t
get it, and suddenly I saw him straddling me,
I could picture him angry, sweating, sputtering,
trying to strangle me for some imagined slight,
maybe slapping me, smirking, and my panic
on the pre-dawn street was in my throat again,
and my body was shaking when I told him
to get out, get out, and stop sneaking up on me.