At the Movies

Something I wrote a while back that I had forgotten. 

At the Movies

In the darkness of the movie light

Your fingers roam my arm
As if to magically inject love
Into my veins, to travel to my heart
To revive a possibility
That you are not my past, not him
Not who shredded my worth
into pieces to win arguments
Not who traveled in the back
of a police car for untamed acts
with unforgiving glare
You are the present
The un-happened future

“I did not like the movie
But I didn’t have to,” you said,
As you held my hand
When we came out of the movies
But I liked being with you
In the present
There were no raised voices
Our mothers were spared
From angered name calling
Car doors were spared
From being slammed
Into our fiery, volatile words
Volcano ablaze
When you least expect

Or when you expect it
All the fucking time
Because you never know
When the sleepy giant
Will awake, burn
Ashes smoldering
Untamed by my tears
This is the end of today
as you know it
This may happen again tomorrow

That dark swollen face in the mirror
Stares at me unmercifully
Tears have left their trace
dripped eyeliners and mascara
Traveling down the cheek
Disappearing under the chin
Haunting me with one question
"Have we had enough yet?"

My eyes crimson,
Puffed as big as the hibiscus
right outside of our house
when I used to hurt myself
for being disobedient
and tell the doctor I fell down the stairs
As he stitched the bloody, bruised lips

Just like Gramma
Plenty disobedient, clumsy
Falling down, hurting herself
We put daisies on her dead body
to fragrance her with tamed obedience
Dressed in white she made her graceful erasure
Memory fades into a steep, stubborn tint

I packed up the shoebox with pictures
Postcards that I always intended to send
The photo albums, too big
to be contained, went in a larger box
He didn’t hear my exit speech
The one that I worked on for a year
Not until the curtains were dropping
When he screamed for an encore
Behind the curtains, I grieved.