Kathleen Robinson "Little Blue Fish" (poem)

LITTLE BLUE FISH by Kathleen Robinson

The limbs of the backyard maples swayed in late Spring winds, their fragile leaves split
in glee. Sunday light slanted in through
too short windows that morning he hauled me into the bedroom.

He held my hair from the back, thick, waist length an easy grab. I’d learn years
later from a cop, this was how men
ganged unsuspecting women in sleepy parking lots.

My head tilted back, slammed the bedside.
My shorts, thick khaki, half moon pockets roughed at the edges, rolled neatly, just above the boned narrow knee. He pulled them off as I lay face down

on the bed, the same instant he pulled
off his belt. You may know that sound. Click of metal released, swoosh of leather
lacing swiftly out of its loops. I shivered.
I’m shivering now.

First whacks are always hardest. You wait and wait. He was furious, towering, wild,
gray curly hair and mustache eyebrowed eyes meeting my own, as he hurled the looped leather across my backside.

The strike brought stars. I held my breath
after that first howl, the third and fourth and fifth. It only angered him more. One blow for each week I was ‘behind’ in writing lines for him,
400 each day.

I howled inside,
shoving the fullness deep down into a core I did not know lived in me.
The Black Forest of broken bones.
It became firmament.

He paused, as if he couldn’t go on.
My ponytail the perfect weapon he used to haul me up against the wall,
The small moon of my head
slamming it.

Busy hands at my neck.
My own forgotten. Feet dangling
a foot off the floor, little blue fish underpants, and khaki shorts crumpled at nine year old ankles.

While he screamed and spit
into my face, fingers lacing into stone around a neck too small for measure. My legs trembled.
My legs are trembling now.

I’ve spent my entire life hiding that part.
Wearing skirts and dresses, long coats and tops
to fall past my hips, covering that woven, weeping part of me, that once was exposed to
a ferrous father enraged.

The last year and a half I have spent in Maine writing classes and groups. The writing work consistently returned me to the childhood I lived in Detroit and Kentucky.  The experience of both is quite different.  Detroit was a white collar descent as my IBM successful birth father realized his alcoholism, resulting in the battering and abandonment of his family....my mother and six kids.  At eleven we moved to Kentucky, the poor part, with a brutal bark of a man, the Step (as I came to call the stepfather), also an alcoholic who beat my mother within an inch of her life on a regular basis, and devoured any innocence we young children might have retained from the previous father in our lives. 

Abuse, alcoholism, danger, and terror were the banners of my childhood.

My 30 year professional career was both as a Five Element Acupuncturist in private practice and a faculty member at three acupuncture colleges.  I found the work holy and I, as the instrument, a witness to the remarkable changes which care, tenderness, and the occasional grace given by the divine can have on the health and well being of the human spirit.  I was a fortunate guest tending others in those quarters, while learning and growing in the process.  As a result, I have come to regard redemption as a foremost Holy Sacrament. 

Little Blue Fish (whose title is thanks to my dear friend, Elizabeth Garber), is a work I wrote one week before hearing about Patrisha McLeans' FINDING OUR VOICES project.  While I have not published poetry, I have written as a young girl, and now as an older woman.  I am grateful to be in the company of creatives who are survivors unafraid to share their bold histories. May the transparency of those who've made it through the many faces of domestic violence be the agency for those who've yet to find their own voices.