Sarah Carson

How to Love the Man Who’ll Rape You

Don’t think about it,
first of all, 

with all the power of now that,
if only.

People say, if you knew then,
as if that’s the way it works,

but you cannot lose
what was not yours.

Your body is not an invitation
or a skeleton key.

What we give to one another,
what we decide between us

is perpetual,
& nothing

is so permanent
that it can’t be broken 

into both particle & possibility,
what once felt solid

as the boys on the bench press
after gym class

crushed like the crunch of gravel
beneath your father’s Jeep.

So when you are 21 years old,
the man with whom you rotated 12 packs

in every now-shuttered grocery store
between this life and the next one

saw something more than you saw
as you brushed your teeth each morning 

in the black edges of a mirror
made cloudy with all it once contained. 

Finally, one afternoon, beyond the reach of
the security cameras’ dilated pupils

he slipped his hand beneath your uniform
like he was holding a candle against an air vent. 

And you thought of all that came next,
like a fog on the door to the dairy cooler— 

how he showed up on your front steps
at 4 in the morning, 

offered himself to you in the porchlight
as if the ending was not out there

also waiting to come in.

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Sarah Carson is the author of poems, short stories and essays that have appeared in such places as Brevity, Guernica, Missouri Review and Diagram, as well as the full-length poetry collection, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books). You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.