Summer of Nectar and Green

I plucked a honeysuckle when I wanted 
something sweet. My mother cut my hair, 
told me not to leave 
the porch, which is why 
I was running through a stranger’s backyard, 
when it was nearing dark, when I tumbled 
into a metal latch
that held the gate shut.
                                                 Later,
I held napkins to my shoulder, watched each one 
burst: red.

My skin would take days to purple and blue. Each day
I nursed my wound in the bathroom. 
Call it childhood, but under those lights, 
I was cleaning a gunshot crater  from a saloon shoot-out, healing 
the deep slice of a dagger, turned upon me, 
as I battled that zombie through the night. . .

                                                      *

                It was only after she died
that I learned my cousin’s husband locked her
in the bathroom for days at a time. I wonder
what she bartered with,

                              against the God of her mind. 
Here’s a sad story that I’m not supposed to tell: When my mother 
asked why this happened and how and what God could allow

            such suffering

I had to remind her of the time 
she read my diary. 

                          Months later, she confronted me

about the fact that I had sex. She cried

                          and told me everyone makes mistakes

and when I told her it wasn’t a mistake

                          she cried

like someone had died, and maybe

                          I died, because in that diary

that I wrote in for months, hiding out

                          in my dormitory, I wrote down things 

I could never say, like when

                          he entered me, I would beg

to someone inside my mind

                          for him to just speak to me again, or how

at lunch, to keep some peace

                          I would undress, instead of eating

let him move his hands

over me. But all this

my mother did not notice

                          when she read my diary, or maybe

it was just my problem

                          to bare.

                                                      *

When I fantasize about the lives
of other women, goodness
is the thing I envy most.

When I join the gym
it is because I want to feel
like them, but also because I want

to outrun a bear (if I have to),
not that I have ever seen a bear,
but I heard one, once, in the mountains,

it’s feet padding along the dirt 
and trail rot, its body bumping into
a tree’s thick bark—no, when I say

I want to outrun a bear, it is because 
of all those times I am late 
coming back to the apartment 

where my boyfriend waits, and I feel 
this electricity surge through me, 
almost as if I have seen a bear, or I know

one is there, but I am alone 
on the trail, far from home, 
and though I search, I have nowhere 

to run, and what if this time
                                                he is not so kind.