I am straining to remember whether you said dumb cunt or stupid cunt that afternoon, cloudy and sleepy in the car, me just three days out of the hospital, vomiting hard on my sneakers, purple and almost brand new. Your face was red from screaming cunt. Fresh from my deathbed you wanted to go to the store and I couldn’t rest and that apple you made me eat would not stay down. Cunt. The first time you called me cunt I was seventeen eighteen maybe nineteen backed into a corner on the cool tile of the kitchen floor someone shouting at you to stop and me outside my body not recognizing my father or myself. I wanted to be dead. And that day in the car I wanted to be dead. It was right after Christmas, this illness so unexpected. When I saw you again I reminded you that yes, you called me cunt dumb cunt stupid cunt does it even matter when your father is calling you cunt— for vomiting a Granny Smith apple onto the floor of a rental car ? When your kidneys are barely functioning and your body is thin and alien and you wish your dad would just go back East so you can remember when Texas was safe and beautiful? And you wouldn’t leave. You said you were sorry. Cleaned the car. Let me cry in bed for barely a breath before barking orders to exercise, my muscles atrophied from weeks of bed rest. I could still smell the hospital, imagine the nurse who held me when I couldn’t sleep and knew that was safer than the man who raised me. Safer than home. Dad, remember how I shivered under the afghan you bought me when I was ten cold and afraid while you told me to stop cowering? How I wanted toast and you told me to clean up the laundry on the bedroom floor? But I know now that I am a cunt. If cunt means kind of dead inside and kind of ready to bite the hand that fed me if cunt means feral cat belly up in the sun until she hears footsteps on the porch if cunt is some wild indictment of a woman, thirty-something, learning to prioritize herself despite the narrative of cunt— a woman who knows when the light is dim and when the gas is turned up enough to burn down this whole goddamned neighborhood

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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