Jett
Systematic/Systemic
Here now is my collarbone, which still slips uncomfortably as a result of being pinned under his knee for half an hour: “We have to talk,” he said to me, his face six inches from mine, “I don’t think you’re really hearing me.”
Here is the back of my left hand, held to the table and used to extinguish a cigarette. I see the scar every day of my life but I don’t always register it. When I chance to ponder it, though, I recall the hiss of his words: “I bet you’re listening NOW.”
Here is my nose which –in concert with my stomach– suddenly and startlingly betrayed me in the middle of a grocery store a handful of years back: Bent over and retching, I realized my nose had objected to the scent memory of plumeria and pikake flowers mingling. Responding to those objections, my stomach took up arms, recalling the way that shame and frustration and hurt and profound, profound disappointment collided within it….this while I was pinned immobile to the carpet with my arms beneath me, being forcibly sodomized, the tumble of spilled flowers surrounding my face.
Here is my cheekbone, which remarkably never saw the light of day under flesh I was sure would eventually split open.
Here is the back of my neck, which grows inexplicably tight of its own volition from time to time, even on my happiest and most peaceful of days. It remembers a myriad of things, I suppose, having been the mechanism for shoving my head toward a corner or a rail or a shattered glass that my errant fingers clumsily released too soon….
Here also is the meat of my back, covered then in smooth, unblemished flesh; both had the misfortune of repeatedly meeting a nailhead that sat anchored in a wall they were slammed against again and again.
Here is my windpipe. It remembers that one sweatshirt, twisted and pressed into service as a ligature device.
Here is my ribcage. Then tense, it wanted for a tender embrace devoid of any poor resolution.
Here are my lungs, which drew ragged breaths into themselves, seeking control over the system by regulating its breathing.
Here are the tender bottoms of my feet, once aching and carrying what we here in the South call ‘stone bruises’…that kind of bruise that results from sharp rock striking hard on barely-protected tendon and bone. My feet were careless in their placement that night as I fled across the frozen late November gravel toward my neighbor’s waiting porchlight, her arms extended just beneath it.
Here oh here is my heart, which slowly regained its equilibrium via the tenderness from other men of a different ilk; they were the ones that said things like, “You have the best laugh of anyone I know,” and “None of it was your fault,” and “I know it’s not mine to make right, but let me try.”
Here now is my voice, which once was only used when pressed into song as a mechanism of self-comfort but now resolves itself toward never being silenced again.
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Jett writes at All Blogged Up and Nowhere to Go.
