Harbinger: A Journal of Art & Literature | 2018-2019

ANOTHER POEM ABOUT HIM WITH FIVE LINES
STOLEN FROM TWIN PEAKS
Hali Saleme Cardenas
I am dead yet I live, the girl wrapped in plastic
whispers to Special Agent Dale Cooper on the TV
playing in the background at your friend’s party.
Laura is full of secrets. The words sting
like an open palm. You looked at me
from across the room with the word secret hidden
in your dark eyes. I looked away – my tongue tracing the welt
where earlier your hands introduced the insides
of my cheek to the jagged edges of my teeth.
poetry 5
Sometimes my arms bend back. I was ignorant
of what that meant until you showed me outside of that house.
The vintage dress adorning my body and its missing buttons
were evidence that arms could violently splay.
We all knew. I wonder –
did your friends know? I am fluent in silence as your phantom fingers
snake around my throat, choking me, though you had said nothing –
done nothing. The bruises peppering my small wrists were a token of love,
of loving, of what I was taught love was.
Women in fragments, women dead, wraaaapped in plastic, women’s bodies
tattered and scattered and served to us on screens, and still they ask
why we stay – like we aren’t being hurt with the same parts they use to show us their love.