Stargazer
Dominique Christina Ashaheed
It is the year of living dangerously.
I'm sixteen and trying to lose my
virginity quickly to someone with soft hands.
Eager to let go of makeshift piety
I look for psalms in slow dances,
tell my nerve endings to be patient,
mark my calendar to watch
for the subterranean dance of
bloodletting and brown skin
bending willfully under cotton sheets
Hoping this boy
has not grown his bones to tools
for bludgeoning the few bits
of girlishness left in me
that have not forgotten
what tenderness can feel like
in the inevitable cruelty
that is adolescence
I'm stargazing.
There is an unfamiliar tremor in my hip.
My navel is a manmade lake.
What it cannot hold runs over and
collects beneath me.
I am glad for the distraction.
My hymen applauds the first
consensual
contact she has ever known.
She will begin the arduous ritual
of disremembering the one
who came before...
I'm stargazing.
My hands are fisted.
This is habitual.
It will take years for them to open
I will forgive that.
He is smiling in my ear.
I can hear thos pretty white teeth.
He did not know redemption could quiver so pink.
I did not know redemption could quiver so pink.
It's dawn now.
And there are a thousand poems waiting
in the space between my cheek
and his collarbone.
I will write them down later.
They are mine for the rest of my life.
The soft refrains of forgiveness that chase
the memories of a pedophile
to dust.
Come back moon!
You and I share the same story!
Glory be to the girl who goes back for her body!
He will sleep through my epiphanies and hallelujahs.
I will forgive that.
Unaccustomed to bones being so loose,
my knees are waiting for instruction.
They have not been told
to fight back or fend off.
I stroke them into silence.
Tell them they are relieved of that duty.
This boy is different.
A day-walker who laughs in his sleep.
My forehead is red from his kiss.
Only molested children love so well.
Or forget so quickly.
He is dreaming now.Left hand pinning me against him safe.
He does not know how often
I bled in the arms of another.
How the scratch and pull of "no"
kept daylight from coming.
Too short a word for some to hear.
It moves through the mouth too quickly
to be considered.
But I have not uttered that with him.
I'm stargazing.
I will watch him sleep
to the sound of yesterday dying
in the bend of his elbow.
Whe he wakes
he will catch me staring.
I am a star.
Gazing.