By Whatever Magic

Look. We are nowhere near home. The car

escaped too many distracted lefts and rights

in the early morning dark, neither of us kept count.

Anyway, I’m too young to see a well-rounded picture

of the world, eye-level with the seatbelt strap,

my feet kicking the pebbled, cracked and plastic

dashboard of my mother’s red hatchback.

The heater switches back on in coughs. Listen.

I couldn’t say the names of unheard of towns

we passed to get here. Nowhere anyone

would think to look for us. Where our voices

seem foreign enough, no acquaintance would turn

or sit up straight if we entered in a conversation.

Our tires grate atop a gravel driveway then stop.

We’re tired. I don’t know if there was paperwork

or if she had called ahead, I just remember

a touch of light tracing the underside of the world

as we hunched on separate bunk beds, my mother

and I, and, through the weight of half-closed eyelids,

spoke reluctantly about what we might do next

like two condemned prisoners making amends.  

Someone brought us a plain clothes basket

with fresh folded sheets, two heavily bleached

comforters, and on top the pile they thought to put

a couple of children’s books for me. Old heavy

creased pages with orange crayon wax, a smell

of corrugated cardboard and too many hands.

I held them tight as I slept that first night in the shelter

so that I had dreams of ghost stories and He-man

and the Masters of the Universe battling Skeletor.

Had dreams we never again go to sleep fighting,

never wake up with a mouthful of tincan adrenaline,

as if we slept with a penny underneath our tongues

or else a slow drip of copper in the back throat

from dried blood caking in your too soft nose.

What else? Like all the women there, I wished (I wish)

wherever a man presses abuse into someone’s flesh,

some strength, by whatever magic, remembers to resist.

That the subtle sleep sense of bodies didn’t send us

waking up with two tightening fists. That these arms

wrapped around my pillow and above my head weren’t

there in self-defense, my legs fixed in a running stance.

The teenager rocking on the floor with the phone cord

snaking up her back. A woman perched on the sofa,

her open wings ready to descend on the phone next.

The mother of three who spent all night rehearsing

an imagined conversation. We rolled up and down

in her cadence, we floated off in a bodiless space.

My mother, too, one of those silent immortals, those

great maniacs of love with their predetermined hearts.

Today, from a great distance, I tried to hear if

those bewildering voices still whisper inside me.

But that old glacier of spite slipped silently into  

a greater sea. One day, one day after a million days

you wake up fearless. I forgot the connect-the-dot

pictures of manhood I left unfilled, uncolored,

unpermanent. I know by now it isn’t my heart

that’s a clenched nerve, but the worlds. I find

nowhere within me that needs be made dangerous.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

The mixture of child-like wonder (I found myself smiling at the notion of counting left and right turns, which rang so familiar) with the very tangible less-tha-wonderful of the adult world. Visual, and spot-on in its somewhat detached tone. This is simply world-class stuff.

[G. Cedillo]

Kortas, you're the best -- thanks, friend