National Poetry Month Day 20: Jacqueline Allen Trimble
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The first time I saw a man
naked, I was wearing pink
pajamas. The flammable kind
before those were forbidden
to children. A little satin bow,
pre-tied and dotted with a rosebud,
punctuated my collar stretched wide
from washings and ringed by stiff
synthetic lace. My mother had bought them
a week before she died, and I wore them
despite the prickly nylon that bunched
strangely and snagged odd bits
of tiny things. My hair stood
in uncombed tufts. My fingernails dirty
from shooting marbles on the red clay road
with the boys. Nobody gonna marry
a Tomboy, girl. I kept playing, crouching low
at the angle of launch, to watch
the beautiful man-made rock bounce
among the pebbles as intensely
as I had watched the window
high above me in the den.
It was long and wide, a slice of light
breaking through in whirly ques
of dust. The sofa was brown plaid. The walls
dark-paneled fake wood.
The space heater still smelled
of melting plastic where, innocent of fire’s
ways, I had tended a small meal for my dolls.
My father put ointment on my hand
without a heart to scold, the same hand
a doctor would years later ask
if I had ever broken. Honestly, I could not say,
neither knowing the complete history
of violence against my body nor how
in a brown den lit by a window too high
for my father to fathom where
he stood outside laughing
with a neighbor, a friend of his
happened to lower his trousers and rub
himself against me and my pink pajamas,
long abandoned to some place
I will never precisely recall.
***
Author photo courtesy of author