down hard
against pain,
keep
my little mouth
wedged shut.
Fighting
back was useless,
anyway. I was
fragile
at three, and Zoe
was a hammer.
Girls
are stinkier than
boys when they
get
dirty, she’d say,
scrubbing until I
hurt.
And if I cried
out, I hurt
worse.
I’M FIFTEEN NOW
And though Zoe is no longer
Dad’s lay of the day, I’ll never
forget her or how he closed
his eyes to the ugly things
she did to me regularly.
He never said a word about
the swollen red places. Never
told her to stop. He had to know,