I imagine my true tongue igniting his fist—see my future prophecy losing its grip, swinging to make blue-black my eye, but I won’t die. I call my sister, rehearsing what she’ll say: Run away. Come home. I’m nearer than the road suggests. I feel my chest heave a century of women leaving scared & singing with straight spine & clear mind. Who knew the brother would became a terror— how a decade later I would run into his ex who rang our bell the nights he hit her, seeking a safe place to sleep. She hit me too, he would weep. Then Fuck you. She was easy to dismiss—crazy, damaged, drunk, leaving a trail of voicemails begging his return. We watched her life burn. He played it smart. No response. A fresh start. I hear her call my name in the once-dark theater after Claudia Rankine’s HELP & turn to face the woman his family banished from memory standing bright & beaming & human & free—I see something of her in me now that the actors glowing red from the wailing sirens—Emergency—have left the stage. Emergency, the play insists: the condition of whiteness in this society, a state knotted in his target: any woman prompting history’s shame, pulp of newfound blame born from & seeding pain. I note his struggle to look me in the eye— lock & key—as he demands an itemized apology. I rise from the occasion of his aim & caress the darkest parts of me, brazen melody, my high cackle wild with arrival.
Maya Pindyck's third book of poems, Impossible Belonging, won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her work has been recently published or is forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Plume, and Bennington Review. She lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design.
