Maybe and Would

I write small, cursive –
the letters of a journalist
who was maybe five years ago abused.


She got out. It’s fine now.

And maybe she lived in New York City. Maybe every morning
as she buttoned her bruises up,
she admired the excellent dirty streets.

It was with a fragile sort of hope.
She wished on drainpipes, discarded cigarettes.
  Crying babies.

Maybe
  if fate diagnosed her terminally lucky
at the exact moment a taxi heaved itself forward
into the path of her erected thumb, it would just keep going –


the brakes would just
                                            fail.


Indubitably.

        “There was nothing
                                                         we could have done,”
                                               the doctors would coo.

And paramedics,
in all their arctic stethoscopian fame would peel her dead,
relieved body

  from the cab’s windshield.

Only the medical examiner
   would know the precision of the accident.

He’d sweep his elegant scalpel across her, right down
the middle

and from her ribs would pop
every red apartment secret
no one ever gossiped about

because she did not live
                               to tell.


  Unlaundered bras, mostly.
Heaps of them.
They couldn’t protect her
           from those hot hands, those hipbones
                                             puncturing her own, the very muscles stuffed
to the brim
     with iniquity, with such absolute selfish fury –
those probing
teeth,

  those: “You will hush. You will not make a sound”

words
spewing
out of them.   


The washer
rusts. And will go on rusting with new force.


The aunts weep
loudest;  especially Hattie. She knew.
She knew,
and she never said
anything at all. Never asked. Just suspected,
and kept buying groceries,
  scrubbing the tub,


clipping her own toenails
                  in her own house.


He doesn’t come to her funeral.

And
seventy years later,
the girl’s headstone  
sweats

           un
forgiveness.