On the Other Hand: Surprise Saves Me

Like the exact moment after the smell of buttered toast
makes me feel safe, before I remember my grandmother

might have started my mother’s violence.

I think one thing, then something else, like it’s not
that I was beaten, it’s that my mother loved to beat me,

and her love felt sexual.

When I tell my therapist my mother killed kittens as a child,
she answers, I’m surprised she didn’t rape you with enemas,

and I say, She did!

And then I feel stupid, like: why didn’t I know my mother
is another psychopath

in a long line of psychopaths?

In some way, I felt safe because I didn’t know
what I was up against. Thank god evil

takes me by surprise again and again.
Or else, what kind of person would I be?


The Man at Pleasure Point

Shirtless in board shorts, jerked by salt and sun, a stogie 
stubbed between his stained lips, crinoline creases below his 
armpits, the aged dichotomy of atrophied limb versus 
loppy belly, he sits with surf dudes who no longer surf, 
points at waves, arcs his leathered arms and torques his 
torso to get tubular in his mind. Once at The Point parking 
lot, he handed me a Converse sneaker, bleached, sole-worn, 
stuffed with soil enough to hold a thready succulent. “Want 
this?” he asked. “It was my wife’s.” He spoke of their stunned 
attraction, thirty-year union, her agonized decline. 
Yesterday, he approached again, asked if I wanted her 
wetsuit for ten bucks, asked if I believed in the afterlife, 
recounted, again, the tale of his loss: she believed in 
reincarnation, lived again in crows, left feathers in his yard, 
crowded out jays, shrilled from power lines, boasted her 
blackness on green lawns. The sun shriveled us, a floating 
otter beat a clam. She dressed in velvet, drew pentagrams in 
dust, ate ayahuasca, time traveled in her sleep. “I’ll buy your 
wetsuit,” I said and handed him a five. Now, it corner-lurks 
on a hanger, tempts me to I-don’t-know-what. It’s black, of 
course, and off-gasses an amber smell, sometimes pot or 
patchouli. Its sponginess is attractive, yet off-putting. Empty 
shadow, hollow arms, faceless manikin, silent and solid 
while my walls and windows, my freckled skin, my lost 
beloveds, like a murderous flock, untree themselves and 
shake up the sky.