53 Days After Being Raped, You Go to Another Party

This fall air bare knuckling truck windows

how old do you need me to be pull a voice

from your throat feel it click open pull a voice

from your throat polyester tape from a cassette

your mom heard hell hell from you

and this polyester night this night’s patchy shave

his neck a dog had been here had knifed its big body

seat to seat I double wrap with little girls like you you slip

a finger into torn leather straighten your neck

no sleepno sleep your head bulging

like the infected cedar your dad sliced open a pinch

something dark but not blood no your tree

goitered with owls owls sticky leaving the gamey trunk

without a sound without a breath hisheat is still rank

on your skin when he opens the glove box tips

his fingers each brass ringlet moving

like an upturned lip in the leer of moonlight

this is another way I split bitches open he laughs

now you take the handpress its coolness

to your cheek

Kindall Fredricks is a practicing registered nurse and an MFA candidate at Sam Houston State University, focusing on both poetry and the intersection of literature and the medical sciences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Letters, Sugar House Review, Quarterly West, Rust +Moth, NELLE, The Coachella Review, Menacing Hedge, After The Pause, Jet Fuel Review, The Academy of American Poets, and more.