The Beaten

I. Shattered

it started with a statue:
            the naked dancing woman
and continued with a fist

My mother fell down with her:
            the statue.
Shattered plaster and concussions
left my mother curled up
like the skeleton of a building
abandoned in the rubble of a
            hate bombing.

 (I fell down)
            yeah,   right.
you fell,      but
            from where
                        and where to
is another story.

I laid there
in a bitter bed
                       next to her
promising never to be her.
bruises and broken bones
swelled up from broken homes
                                      never really heal.

at that time, she wasn’t my mother
           or      more my mother
                                     than ever before.

II. At the Woman’s Shelter

 
We slept in bunk beds
            Four to a room

Dressers crowded with forsaken
mementos; stolen in a
        desperate moment springing up
                                     fear fountains:
memories only good for drafting fruitless tears.

We were all scared
           (What will become of us?)
mostly of the past.

I sat through
          crutch meetings with my mother
as the others cried along:
they all knew
                      exactly       what it meant
                              to be hurt. 

there were seventeen of us
            and six small children:
whose crying reminded me of
                                    Ave Maria       

we were all lost
                A maze of spaghetti
                for twenty plus.

we were all hurt

               Therapy was the only
                loose link that kept us chained

to each other and our pasts

                and rusted into our skins
                scraping every one of us

     like tetanus clockwork.