Who wasn’t shoved in a room by Boy Who Would Grow Up
to Be Rapist, his hands at work while her friends picked the lock?
Who would be saved one night after a van sputtering Moonglow
stopped, and a man chased the girls through backyards,
pinned one cold to the ground until she kicked, then ran a run
she still dreams of, feet weighted like barbell discs? I tell you,
we stayed in groups, passed the gym, door propped to the sweat-
smell of rubber, past the older boys breaking outside the pizzeria,
Billy Squier stroking the transistor behind the counter. We crossed
the lot of Small-Town River and Bar, door ajar to the smoke-
strange dark in summer, men gesturing with their bottles to come.
All we wanted were Zero bars, Mars bars, and those waxed lips
we’d toss after the gag was over, or, if we were lucky, go on
that Paris trip in high school after what parents called the fleeting
years of finger jello, jimmied cake, and truth or dare in basements—
when parents let children sleep out on the porch where Johnny,
uninvited to the glider, slid a soiled thumb down the blade of a hunting
knife. This is what it was like: they grabbed us on roadsides, their chests
out a Chevy like hounds, hands sweeping our behinds. They grabbed
us bolting lawns skirted with azaleas, down tight halls between periods,
beneath the tracks by the river, as if they were pulled aside, taught to gaze
past a body like their mother’s. No one knew but the bright crown
vetch along the bank, the coal piles’ lesser mountains, and the split-
level homes with garages open like dirty mouths threatening to eat us.