Have you forgotten
the bowl of fish that you left
in the refrigerator last year and how long
you waited for me to gut and scale?
Two weeks, maybe, until it started to stink
and the fins curled over like
a woman’s eyelid
closing. It has always been what I did not do
instead of what I did, which is:
going to the field behind
our house to watch
a young woman be raped. We like to think
that in such a situation that we
would become made of wild boar to charge in
but I am a woman too and
I walked home quietly
with my eyes only open to a slit,
like the size of two small wounds
like the size of sharp small stones
that are pushed by waves over sea glass
shaping it.