Her Other Name

Abstract

For Girl X, Chicago The first thing we took away was your name. We erased the bleak shame from each syllable, blurred the image of your tiny body broken into network sound bytes, snippets of videotape with a swollen face Xed out. X as in she is no longer a good girl. X as in two simple lines crossing where a beating heart should be. You were little, like we don't want to remember. You were stutter-folded, you were beaten liquid on those lonely stairs, your skin was slashed, you were raped with a fist and sticks, insecticide sprayed into your seeing and down the tunnel of your throat. He must have held your mouth open, stretching the circle, leaving moons in your lip. The violation left you blind and without tongue, wrecked the new clock of you. You were jumprope doubletime and pigeon-toed, navy blue Keds with round toes and soles like paper, jelly sandwiches and grape smash fingers, you, ashy-kneed rose, missing rib, splintered and flinching through a death sleep. In which direction do we pray? To recreate you, they relied on ritual. Weeping nurses gently parted your hair, the teeth of the comb tipped in rubber, and dried blood showered from your scalp like chips of paint. They rubbed warm oil through the unraveling braids, threaded ribbon through to the ends. We will give you back your life by pretending you are still alive. Lowering your X into a tub of warm water, they scrubbed you with stinging soap, sang songs filled with light [End Page 1047] and lyric, then dabbed you dry with those brutal sickbed towels, avoiding the left nipple, smashed before it began. They wrapped you in the stiff garb of virgins and told you that you were healed, there in that stark room of beeping machines and blood vials and sterilized silver, they built you a child's body and coaxed your battered heart back inside. Girl Girl X. The violation left. X you blind and X voiceless And they braided your hair every day, gently, the ritual insane, strands over, under, through, over, under, through, fingers locked in languid weave, until the same of it all brought your voice back. The nurses cheered, told you they'd found a cure for history, that the unreal would refuse to be real. Soon you'll be able to see again, they whispered. I know you never meant to be ungrateful, my rib, when you rose up half and growled this grace: that's that's OK you can keep my eyes