#MeToo
According to some, the Inuit have one hundred words for snow.
According to others, there is only one, is snow itself,
and everything else/is merely a myth.
In some ways, everything has been taken from me
in different languages. A vowel when I awoke
with no memory of the previous night, a letter when his hand went
where it should not go, whole sentences
when something burst inside me/ like a burning star.
The way cicadas go out dying/
is with an ending of sound.
The way a woman ends/
is along with all her ancestors.
When I lay there, pressed against the floorboards,
there was a relative before me/
pressed against the earth.
In autumn, I lose color as the trees regain it.
There are so many fingers that I renamed love.
The nails too/the veins/the half-moon/
of his cuticles as he used them.
To come out on the other side of a killing,
you must give the killer an antonym.
Not slaughter/not disgrace/not turning/
not starving/not dust/but tender.
But mercy. But what I owe.
I thought it was owed because I made an ode.
For him to be the only love,/
for there to be/no one else/but him.
In snow, I see only the one footprint.
No other word for snow. No other name.
I was the one who took the shovel.
Who dug the hole. For a year,
I called it fine. I called it okay,/
called it/not hurt.
And the dirt fell down,
over my head,
until it grew deeper,
until it became an acceptable axis
I could turn on.
He became forgiven.
And when I discovered the one hundred words
were a myth,
I wept. I wept because it was fiction.
And what I had undergone
was real.
