Poetry

pixabay photo

By

Nina Heiser

seeds of rape forgotten fruits

i

I do remember

now

elbows and knees and please

grappling grasping gasping

panting depanting pushing

tangled terror thrusting

Noooooooooo

the crash of bone on metal

and silence

it wasn’t quite

I told myself but

it wasn’t not

I shut it out

I let it go

I told myself it wasn’t so

his upper body sagged floor-ward

the waist-downward weight of him

collapsed onto me restraining controlling

his eyes fluttered open

I’m going to die

and closed again

Shall we break here?

Do you need water?

ii

and because I was a good girl

I went to find him help

how wild I must have looked

to those young men

sitting on their leather chairs

in the fourth-floor lounge

they laughed at first

continued their drinking

then promised when

they saw I was still there

like a timid child on the periphery

they would take care of everything

I could leave as if I weren’t part

of the puzzle which after all did not

much interest them

and I so left

and so I looked away

and so I

let it go let it go let it

go

iii

can we leave it buried

what could it matter now

it was 49 years ago

you don’t really want

to live your life remembering

rape took your virginity

Nina Heiser

Nina Heiser is a writer living in central Florida. She wrote poetry in her 20s then turned to theater and journalism, working as a local reporter for newspapers in western Massachusetts and southern Maine. She turned back to poetry when she retired and is beginning to send out her work.