TRIGGER WARNING: ALLUSIONS TO BULLYING / CHILDHOOD TRAUMA Lunch Money A girl at my high school asks for my lunch money & takes it when I say no. I don’t know her name. She thrusts hands into my sweater pockets, serious, sweaty. I’m scorched by her lank hair, feral breath. They say her dad is gone. Not lost but left. She takes the money, pushes me aside, playground inhales me. Bone opens like a shell opens, splintered & soft. I wear a cast for weeks. Everything has a way of opening, an onion, a shell, a story, waves with craving mouths, wounds. She drops out of school. That was years ago. Now when my arm aches in winter I think of her, how hard the asphalt slam felt, sky aslant, her sideways look of triumph, teeth clenched. She went where her dad went, gone nowhere, as if there were a road there at all. I felt the hatred she bled for her dad, I swallowed all the words she couldn’t throw away. Lynn Finger’s poetry has appeared in Ekphrastic Review, 8Poems, Perhappened, Twin Pies, Book of Matches, Drunk Monkeys and is forthcoming in Wrongdoing Magazine. Lynn is an editor at Harpy Hybrid Review and works with a group that mentors writers in prison. Follow Lynn on Twitter @sweetfirefly2.
|