Invincible Summer

Invincible Summer


Crystalline core
of my being
splintered.
Prisms without inner fire
fall and shatter.

I try to puzzle the pieces together
into the whole that was me--
Except I am not that me anymore.
Nor can I ever be.

Immediate aftermath--
A haze of further indignities
but by then it no longer matters.
I have gone somewhere else.
No longer a loving, living person,
reduced to little more
than a file:
one dimensional words
on a flat piece of paper.
Nowhere there
the terror,
the sheer enormity of it all
so vast, so overpowering--
I am blotted out.
No one understood. Or could.
I was cold. Bitter cold.
Deep, arctic, nothing can live through this cold cold.
I just wanted to sleep.
Hibernate through Winter.


I looked at pictures
taken within hours.
Crazed look
Hollow, empty, helpless, broken.
My face swollen from his anger.
He didn’t even know me.
I don't know me anymore.
Bruises layered on welts.
Smeared blood, limp left arm.
A perfect imprint of his hand.
Even in black and white photos
blood looks red.

Shame rolls in like an unending tide:
caught in that undertow
I sink. At the bottom still
pushed and pulled by events,
I drown in guilt,
unable to wash myself clean:
no water will ever penetrate deep enough to cleanse the filth.
It freezes solid.
I am trapped within the glacier.


Icy tears avalanche
down marble face.
There is no answer to the question—
Are you okay?


A few words of a newscast
overheard in another room.
A piece of me heard and grabbed on to them,
refused to let go.
Mosquito words at 2AM
Buzzing in my head, just out of reach.
I slapped them away.
There is no repellent
to spray away the inevitable.

I had to know.
I became the mosquito;
morphed into bee.
I would not be slapped away.
Then it hit me.
Handprint. Perfect impression of a handprint.

Mug shot photos,
Computer images.
Afraid I’d see his picture,
Scared to death I wouldn’t.
When I did
I threw up
but a piece of ice melted.

She’d picked out his picture too…
moments before
She died.

Detective in my kitchen drinking coffee.
The new normal.
Would I
testify?
I was terrified.
I loathe that sick beast.
With hate that has become woven through every fiber
I hate.
It is pure hate that holds me together.
My counselor tells me my anger is simply the next step
Into spring.

To face him.
I shake and unravel.
Ice forms backbone:
Icicle dagger
Piercing me,
I bleed once more.
Blood freezes.
I will do this.
I must.
For me, For her.


He smirks at me across the courtroom.
Bottomless eyes, a knowing grin.
He has torn me apart
and now I am flayed open
once more by his attorney.
Tears threaten, engulf me.
I thought I had no tears left.
Yet,
with each word
more ice melts.
I tell my truth.
Her truth.
No longer is it
simply about me.
And it is heard.

Fragmented being melds together,
My voice stronger now.
I warm.
In that cold courtroom,
I take back my soul.
I look at him
and I know
Summer has come.