I didn’t ask for it.
Something moved
in the tall grass.
Neither my imagination
nor the wind,
light rippling in the heat.
He had a human face.
But he wasn’t
human. He was
a hunger. Not for me —
for what he could do
to me: shepherd boy
alone in a field of thorns,
flock grazing
tufts of rhododendrons,
the world with its
back turned. He kissed me,
moved his wolf tongue
in and out
of my mouth, a hole
he filled with himself.
Disrobed, he tied
my underwear around my knees,
licked the bottom of my feet.
I didn’t like it.
I didn’t understand
what was happening.
When I said his name,
when I shouted what he was
at the top of my lungs —
a desire
for something
he couldn’t keep —
he dragged me by my hair
across the devil’s wilderness.
My back whittled
and threadbare. I wished
my scalp and skull had split,
spilled the contents
of my brain like rind
in a garden of unearthly delights
so I could be dead —
stay dead — and not chase
the impulse to testify
pulsing in my blood.
Cause and effect.
He planted me on a grove
overlooking my village.
He pushed his sex inside
me. The sky hid
behind gathering clouds,
too disgusted to look.
Perhaps it’s a gift
only to feel my body
taken from me.
Perhaps observation’s a lie.
No one believed me
anyway. No one came.
Only him.
Again
and again,
until there was
nothing left.
