Parataxis

Here are the facts: the minivan flipped first. Lay on its side like a dead dung beetle. It was 2 a.m. My father saw the van and slowed down. Mist climbed the stairway of trees beside the freeway. I was five, at home with my aunt, asleep when the call came. An eight-car pile-up. A drunk driver. My father pulled the man’s booze-heavy body out as a spark flicked and lit the engine. Shrieks careened between the flattened cars: let him burn.

*
I brought my boyfriend’s best friend on a walk. The crowded porch shrunk behind us as our heads lolled like lollipops on spit-soaked sticks. It was the 4th of July. Before he lifted his hand to my breasts, he looked me in the eye. You have no idea what a shirt like that does to a man. His thick arm around my shoulders, the clasp of his bracelet caught in my hair. My hands barricaded my chest. The swell of his hand, trying to push through. All the while, we walked down a shivering hill toward the sea. A green breeze blew off the sea.

*
My father at the edge of my bed the next day. You have two options, he said. He was slick with seething. I can either kill him or put him in the hospital.

*
Tonight, in the bath, my lover and I pretend we’re children. We use pitched voices to say small words. When I ask what grade he’s in, we both laugh until the water roils and curls. I curl his wrinkled fingers into my palm.

*
In The Salesman (2016), a man assaults Rana in her home, in the shower. Her husband cannot move on. Leaving the theater, my father says it’s one of the best movies he’s seen in years. In the film, the couple are actors, rehearsing The Death of a Salesman. They have trouble keeping their real life out of rehearsals. Rana cries, her husband yells. Throughout the movie, Rana cultivates silence. A braid she does and undoes, over and over in a crown around her head.

Sara Kaplan-Cunningham’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Washington Square Review, Redivider, Oxidant | Engine, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor fellow and serves as poetry editor for Gulf Coast.