‘The Inviolable It’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Inviolable It

Her anger always boils over just before supper,
manifested in a single nonsensical utter.
She pricks and pries and searches and seeks
to articulate her innards before the words fretfully retreat.
Those words, however, are indeed very sneaky.
They scutter and hide and run like jumping mice, real squeaky.
Lingering just long enough to maintain the belief
that there’s an explanation for her inconsolable grief.
For if an explanation doesn’t exist,
some forgotten reason she’d somehow missed,
if there’s no seed for which this gnarled tree was sown,
how is the girl to untangle its rotted-out roots, it’s merrowed bone?
How is she meant to stomach it all,
the microwave meals, the sacrilegious sex, the quiet phone call
from the silent home where they all know
he's lying in wait, a broken pistol loaded with ammo?
The nights in which she cradles herself to sleep,
heaving with cries?
She does better than her mother ever could
and more than her father would even try.
How is she to stomach it all when it sits in her lungs and squeezes at her heart
and punishes her liver when she attempts to flush it out?
When it’s mixed into the blood that pours from her knees,
from being all-too-much in a stranger’s backseat?
When it weighs down her limbs and leaves her huddled up in the shower,
wishing to God that the one washing the sadness out of her scalp was not herself,
but her mother?
How is she to stomach it when It is herself,
It is who she is, It is her destiny laying dusty on the shelf?
When will the words come to her softly
and finally admit what they’ve been avoiding so awfully?
When will they admit that her language, her suffering, her YUCK,
is not a possession or extension that she keeps in her pocket,
but rather a facet of herself for which she has been sewn together?
By uncareful, rough, uneven hands, an awfully plain, old, cruel endeavor.

Hannah Messer is a current undergrad at the University of Southern California. She is studying Pre-law and English to eventually venture into politics and work as an attorney. A lover of words, Hannah will someday retire to the mountains to write.