Physical abuse, sexual abuse

In a bed made of grass

I put what I know. My mother had been a girl
like I had been a girl. But that’s where it ends.
I know nothing. Not the dress she loved
or the friend she had or the story of the nest
or what animal she cut open in biology class.
Nothing. Except her mother terrified her
until the day the mother died. That I knew.
To fall in love is to fall into being seen.
I’d been inside her, turning as she turned,
shielding herself, flinching as she flinched.
Her right arm flung dishes. I heard her skin
bruise and heard it after I was past the cord
that went from me to her, from the time
when my heart was a miniature fist
below her heart. Our two hearts stacked
inside her, fixed in place. They pumped
and pumped. We never saw each other
undress. Years later, I was sick,
and the doctor kept her in the room,
my body a stranger to us both like the cord
between us cut with her eyes closed.

 

On my pillow of leaves, I put what I know.
His only love note in her yearbook:

 

Dear ________,
You should wash
your hair. It looks greasy.
________.

 

On a blanket of moss, I put what I know.
He was an artist, but what he painted,
what he made, I never saw. He beat
the shit out of her,
my brother said.
He was a grifter, my cousin said.
He said that someday I would have
titties like my mother. He kneeled
to my level to whisper this secret
when we were alone. He had no car
but drove us once to see his mother.
To see her hold and stroke a cigarette.
To see her indifferent, tall and angular.
She did not cook. She was a hard woman.

 

He gave me a small ceramic horse
whose leg broke off. I kept the horse
and leg in its white box. It was not treasured;
I simply looked at it once in a while.
Sometimes I fit the broken leg
to the broken part of the body.

 

On a wall of leaves, I tear off what I know,
my newborn brother crying. The violence.
She couldn’t handle it.
I was inside her then,
listening. My brother newly born.
My shop teacher said, Your father
was the best artist I ever taught.

No one else ever called him my father.
My mother just used his name. Did I
want him back?
as a threat, and soon
there was no name, no question, no one else

 

had been there except us, and after he left
I had a dream where a country boy
lay me on the cot again, again.
He was like Daniel Boone, always
outside and surrounded by light,
legs dressed in deer skin. Grass
overgrown and no one for miles
but me, and him, the cot. The dream
kept choosing me. I saw it in the textbook
lacquered with a flag, and I saw it inside
a barn on the school field trip where yolky
unwashed wool glinted in the sun,
and I saw it in the shop room
with the moans of saws and metal sheets,
the gloves, the vise on each tabletop.
My father lived in town, but I never
saw him again. I was afraid

 

of the town parades and the flags
wrapped around the poles
and the shop room and the TV show
where Daniel Boone lived fenced in
with his horses. Without a picture

 

of my father, I forgot his face.
I thought the only language
that people meant was the one
the eyes spoke. Words had other
tasks: to tell you what you couldn’t
say, to caution what the hand did.

 

In my bed beneath the tree,
I made an inadvertent fist, thumb
tucked in, the kind I’ve been told
is not good in a fight, the kind I clutched
to my chest when I played in my house,
a wordless house made of grass and leaves,
a house where love went, wind blowing
through it, where I learned to scamper
at any sound, listening for little marks
and sharp turns, a house where I learned
to hear through skin.


Jessica Cuello is the author of Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, and the author of Yours, Creature, forthcoming from JackLeg Press in spring of 2023. She is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded the 2017 CNY Book Award, the 2016 Washington Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is a poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review.