It begins slowly and small, like an incinerator's
fire, as it must, because no woman would
love what you became. After five years,
you would wake me in the night to interrogate
with candles, burning incense as your serum.
Whom I had seen, and when, did I
have lunch with any man? until, exhausted,
I began to understand why people may confess
to crimes. You and your psychologist --
Delusional, he said -- you called it driven
mad with love. I left you anyway.
That night a year later, near Halloween,
you broke into my home and beat the man
asleep next to me until he had no face --
he left his cheek's pulp in his place as he ran
out, naked and faceless, and drove himself
away from both of us. You chose to rape me then,
dragged me by my ankles through blood and
shards of glass. Even today, I do not understand
how any man could do it or why you left me
alive, your own face contorted into nothing I
recognized; how, within minutes, you swept my
dignity, my god, the whole order of the world
as I knew it, away, how I remained imprisoned
in my own body as though it had stayed there
on the floor. After your incarceration, you visited
our child and wondered why I would not let you
kiss me good-bye. Because my skin would not
allow it. By day I cowered behind my own shoulders --
at night I dreamed of bullets. Finally, years after,
your mind let me go, but I did not believe it --
I stood squinting in the blue air as one among
the bony women who walked out of Dachau
wondering what I should do with the
shreds of woman left through every long
day that would follow, now that I could choose.
 

[Published with permission of Karenne Wood]