Once in a car, a good boy
shook me hard. If you like it
that way in bed, then why are you…
the tiny bruises on my arms
where his prints pressed into my pink
sleeves rose to the surface like rattles.
Like requests. They thrived there
for a week until they settled
into a wet blackness.
A bruise can sweeten your blood,
can bloom the sweetness into you.
A bruise can bloom rabbits like pines.
Once in a car, everything between us
started growing. And then I was not
in the car or the state
or the east coast anymore.
I was at the summit of a prayer
reeling from an animal mouth,
my tongue an unseeable act,
because, here is the truth:
Even the good boys
want to shake you down, want to come
in your mouth and hair, want to quake
above you if only
for a moment. Come home.
Come home, another good boy says.
I would never shake you. I would never
do anything to your body.
Megan Fernandes has work published or forthcoming in Rattle, Guernica, PANK, The Denver Quarterly, The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among many others. Her book, The Kingdom and After, was published in 2015. She is an assistant professor of English at Lafayette College and lives in New York City.
