Wednesday Poem: "Forty-Five Minutes"

A spider with flies

The story of this poem: A story about a day when I asked the wrong question.

Content warning: child abuse, spousal abuse

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

Strange, 
how a spider with flies in her web will rage.
We sat in a line, 
the three of us
on the defeated-brown-plaid couch,
the one that followed us from the place of my birth up 
to the sparse and quiet town we now called home.
Brother, father, me:
ducks in a row.
My mother treated Dad like a disobedient son,
not a bedfellow.

In the books I read alone in my room,
parents were a unified team,
equally strong and valued.
Mine were something else,
something complex and unsatisfying,
too quiet and too loud. 

I sat on the couch with my two brothers:
sponged up the screaming,
familiar like water.
Young me had long since learned to fade my hearing.
I never knew how long the tantrum would last.
There was no stopping it,
no reasoning,
and after a certain number of years, 
I turned to other techniques. 

I wore my prized pink Timex,
the one I had longed for after seeing it in my YM magazines:
black plastic band,
deep metallic pink case,
a face with a swirling, deep-magenta design I traced with my eyes
as my mother keened. 

I raised my hand, 
the way I had been taught in school.
(In class, the rules made sense.
Gravity applied.
It was so easy to succeed there.
All I had to do was work hard and be nice.)
The motion of my body silenced my mother for a beat.
I used the break in noise to speak:
"It's been forty-five minutes."
The strength of ancestors flooded me:
“How much longer is it going to be?” 

-file corrupted-

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