Originally published in themarkliteraryreview.com
I don’t recall her name, and I’m too afraid
to ask, but still I can see her smeared
eye-liner, those torn fishnet stockings and
that spiky blonde mane as if she stands
before me now. The image of her smashing
her fists clad in fingerless gloves against our
front door will never fade. Her anguished
adult accusations, my old man’s shouting
and my mother’s sobbing on the stairs, me
sitting in the window of the front bedroom
over the porch, it’s all there. A tragic
tableau, my earliest memory.