by Lois Chapin
I can work longer.
I can stand the heat.
But I can’t purchase the release of my brother
and his Hot Wheels.
Left behind to take twice his share.
Parking Ticket
I don’t understand
what he’s thinking.
I’m confused; maybe
I’m just stupid,
incompetent
or just plain unlovable.
He’s helped move my boxes
to the storage unit.
He detailed my car
and picked me up
at the airport.
talked about the weather, what the kids
are doing and then he explodes
at the parking ticket
machine.
I want to run
away,
skip dinner.
Dramatic tantrums
or outbursts
of anger
in those close to me
have foreshadowed
their turning their rage
on me.
I’ve tried to hold
them off,
I’ve failed
at times.
I grabbed my mother’s
wrists
when she clawed at my face.
I grabbed her
didn’t let go.
She tore up
my arms,
but I saved
my face.
I didn’t give that
up.
My first boyfriend knocked
me to the ground
with his fist.
I caught
myself
before my cheek skidded
across the asphalt.
My ex berated
me
until four in the morning
when at last
I curled up in a ball
sobbing in the corner.
But he only swore
at the parking meter
not at me.
Maybe he was just hangry
or needed a drink.
He needs a drink
by midafternoon
to be civil.
Maybe I’m reading too much
into this.
I stir
my ginger and wasabi
into the soy sauce.
I talk about my trip
to visit my daughter.
He changes
the subject
to my writing.
We pick up sushi
with pointed chopsticks.
I want to scream.
His Own Cartoon Book
Witnesses record through their own eyes.
My brother disappeared into the swampland.
The blonde blue eyed surfer
left California to be an Okie.
A xenophobe, homophobic security guard,
a massage therapist.
His Valentine’s book
a witness to our childhood.
The bleak highlights:
catching our parents in the act,
the beatings,
all captured in his 6 point bio.
His disappearing act
his head bashed into door knobs
and wooden coat hangers broken over his body.
From the right of his star-chasing tail,
through the night sky
to a stationary
self-emulating speck
that disappears in daylight.
Dip
Our parents were buddies in the fifties.
Mine convinced his
to be baptized by immersion
in San Luis Obispo.
His mom couldn’t conceive.
(Later she’d have an affair with my dad,
who said feminists couldn’t climax either.)
When my mom announced
she was pregnant with me,
they adopted Randy.
After my parochial university expelled me,
I ran away to his room, since he’d moved out.
He invited me to bring in 1978
at the Peninsula dance,
to get-down funk and beautiful waves of black men.
Us two
white kids with no rhythm.
He wanted to dip me.
Halfway down,
I changed my mind,
afraid he’d let go.
Years later,
I visited,
the skeleton lying on our old bed,
six foot one,
90 pounds.
His mother left the room,
carrying adult diapers with blue gloves,
I’d been married at 21.
He’d complied with college
vaccinations requirements.
The sleeping HIV
thundered into full-blown AIDS.
Me, an excommunicated fundamentalist,
reborn into a secular world.
He, at peace with going back to dust,
no belief in eternal rewards.
All I could say was,
“Let go, it’s okay.”
Rearview Mirror
“Thank you,” I say
to the private detective
as I hang up.
Real danger can only be assessed
though retrospect,
and a rearview mirror
is the only accurate looking glass.
I remember pulling the rusty
cab door closed
and reality grabbing
me as I tugged up
my muddy duck-print
panties
dragging from around one high
heel.
“Si, hotel Del Rey,” I confirm
as Willie shoves crumpled pesos
through the driver’s open
window.
Willie Rammer.
Later my therapist would
tell me
his name should have been
a warning.
But at eighteen
he was just the curly-headed friend
of my new boyfriend.
Curly and his flight-attendant
wife had flown
from the windy city to meet us
in Mazatlán.
This was only my second commercial flight.
The first was
to Sacramento
on an eighth grade school field trip,
where I declined the soda
for fear it wasn’t really
complimentary.
Having escaped Seventh-Day Adventist
constraints, I only knew
my new boyfriend was
“of the world.” He drank
Johnny Walker, smoked Benson
and Hedges and drove
a black Trans Am.
He took me to restaurants that served
courses,
and now had flown me to exotic Mexico
to meet up
with his boyhood friends.
The two young men took me
on a tour of bars with mismatched
chairs, seventies top 40 tunes
and shots of tequila with hash tracers.
I felt special,
grown up.
I laughed.
I danced.
This is what sin felt like.
When the battered cab dropped
me off,
I staggered through the lobby
and found a Pinol-scrubbed restroom
on the third floor.
I crawled across the polished stone
and hid between the toilet
and the wall unraveling into sobs
as I pulled at threads
from my blue
home-made skirt.
This was my fault.
This was what happened
to sinners.
In the morning he told me
he’d watched the whole thing
from across
the dark alley behind
the last bar.
The rape was set up
as a test.
A test,
which I of course
failed.
While everyone else sipped dark coffee,
I swam out to sea
hoping a shark or rip tide
would steal me
away
from the long silent humiliating flight
home.
But after an hour I turned
back toward the resort
afraid of what might be lurking
in the shallowing water
as I approached an outlying
island.
Guilt-ridden, I promised
not to tell Curly’s wife in exchange
for a flight home.
With this incident my new boyfriend
purchased 15 years of control
and my acquiescence.
And now
the P.I., apologizing,
confirms the numbers
on the cell phone
did belong
to hookers.
Turns out he’d been paying
for it
all along.
I replace the phone
in the console,
turn up the radio
and press down
the accelerator.
The breakable bit in,
“Once I saw through a glass darkly
but now face to face,”
must have been
a rearview mirror.
Tape Recorder
I use a miniature tape recorder
to dictate patient notes
and psychological
testing reports.
I give
the little cartridges to a transcriptionist
who then returns them blank
and hands me APA-exquisite pages
to put in patient charts.
Today
it’s for a different purpose.
I open the back door
to the Eldorado
(he developed a thing for these old people’s cars
laying carpet for the Italian mob
in Chicago).
I press the play
and record
buttons
down together.
A little red light comes on
and I slip the device into the black leather
pocket behind the driver’s seat.
Leaning inside
the Cadi,
I can see his cell phone,
plugged in,
the same one
I got the numbers from.
The P.I. said
Stress Busters and the Mirage Massage Parlor
had both recently been busted
by vice.
A U.S. Gypsum Corporation quarterly report
sits on the passenger’s side floor
with a photo of a grey-haired man
and a VP smile.
Only his blue eyes were passed
down.
The “Kawasaki Lets the Good Times Roll”
lime green logo
shouts up
from the crumpled tee shirt
on the back seat.
A lone squashed Benson
and Hedges cigarette nestles
in the ash tray.
The leather still has that
new car smell.
I have to do this.
I need to know who Gina is
who drives the red convertible Mustang,
like the one he rented on our last vacation
to Sedona,
and who Kelly is,
who “can bring a friend along.”
The P.I. wants me to be wrong,
but I know I’m right.
He leaves his Rolex at home when
he goes out
while I’m bathing the kids.
He’s a show off, he never leaves
his Rolex.
The one I bought him
with the first money I made
as a therapist.
I need to know
what he’s doing.
I need to know why
he threw me across the bed
after he came.
I need to know if having sex
with him
puts me or my kids
in danger.
Soon I’ll read
the kids a bedtime book
about a boy who turns into a hawk,
and then sing them
to sleep.
He’ll go out.
I close the car door
with Eldorado quiet
and slip back into
our home.
Scars
I’ve seen scars tattooed into fish bones
and ones tatted up with zipper pulls.
Men flaunt them
as card carrying warriors.
Women hide them under plastic surgery.
Keloids,
sloppy patch jobs
over original wounds.
Knotted speed bumps
that replace nubile flesh.
An inventory,
along with finger prints,
when arrested.
Petroglyphs
left by adolescents
releasing their pain.
My grandfather carried his,
sliced into his back
by his mother,
into an early grave.
Maybe scar tissue
is stronger
than the original skin.
Damaged dermis
bears witness anyway.
But the only time
it mattered at all,
was when my scars
fell in love
with yours.
Radio Frequency
She checks the boxes on her clipboard—
Postmenopausal: check
Two births: check
Abdominoplasty: check
Read HIPPA, informed consent,
limited liability: check
Labia to be reduced: check
Tightening: check.
He still dreams about the dead wife,
Young, two C-sections
vagina, virginal tight.
She still calls him pet names in his sleep.
I can’t compete with death.
“Feet up in the stirrups, like a pelvic,”
the doctor says
in her Austrian accent.
RF is warm, not dick warm
but not speculum cold either.
I want to be tight,
suction tight,
so he has to pull hard to leave me.
“That’ll be three treatments,” the doctor says
painting my labia with the metallic magic wand.
�
��They charge 5600 in Newport Beach
at the inventor’s stirrups,” she says.
The tiny blue pill needs a pink pill bargain.
KY usher’s the RF radiator up inside.
I picture puckering, sea anemone retreat,
a baby’s arm holding an apple.
She says, “Can you believe these refugees?”
I see her eyes and nose
above the blue paper drape.
“They’re babies and people being bombed
out of their homes,” I say.
“Yeah, but really, what skills
do they bring?” she says. “I was a doctor!”
The dead wife fades into the sea of corpses
rolling out with the tide and washing up on the shore.
Give me your tired, your poor,
your slack post-birth pussies.
The blue paper rustles.
She lifts the stainless lamp
beside my golden doors.
Immigrants are foreign to the land
that invites them in.
Darwin Rolls His Eyes
Natural selection is the shadow I deny.
Forced at knife point, overpowered, craved.
Double helix puppeteer strings are invisible.
Grabbed, pulled by my hair, slapped.
They’re the ignored ropes we all call “free will.”
Tied down with restraints, pants cut to shreds from the crotch.
Tickets sell like hot cakes for roller coasters
to trigger my fight or flight response.
Blind folded, throat gripped, nipple twisted, gagged.
Netflix binging on sexual jealousy that engages my interloper rage.
Chef knife drawn across my chest, followed by hot drips of melted wax.
Blasts of road rage ignited by DNA, warning that disrespect
could lower social standing and so my chances of getting laid.
Claimed, owned, desired, without choice.
Choose chocolate over salad to store energy for the winter ahead.
Needed, driven, craved, objectified, helpless to resist.
Nucleic acid instincts command I obsess about my offspring,
who face dangers I don’t even understand.
Ripped, ripped apart, ripped into, ripped from, ripped away.
Crystal Pier
Getaways are about drinking too much
where the kids can’t see.
For me, hotel keys still hold a bit
of the forbidden and naughty.
Parking it in another zip code
gives me license to be someone else.
In the late 60s
the cottages built on this wooden pier
housed junkies, panhandlers and easy women
vacationing from the establishment.
I was waiting turns for playground swings then.
But Pacific Beach sold other flights.
At the height of the pier’s debauchery in ‘77,
