with precision

the title read, talking about sex
with 9 to 12 year old girls. given to me
by mom, then not another word said.
perhaps there was something substantial
to it, I remember very little,
other than the mention of frogs
and tadpoles. or maybe it's that I
spent too much fun and freedom
in neighborhood ditches that summer.
regardless, the rest I must have picked up
along the way, learned as I listened.
then my cousin taught me her ways,
marking her cycle on a calendar
with a bold black felt tipped X.
as if I needed this blatant reminder.
each month still comes and goes
with precision for me, my breasts
swell and ache for about a week before,
a week of nuisance and warning. seven days
of thinking that if I were a sadistic sort,
which I am far from, wondering if there is
just one man out there, who feels this same way,
his suspended balls aching, the way I do with
two round bruises swaying from my chest,
with precision, once a month.

---

don't get drunk, mommy

asks one little girl, and somewhere
another child remembers
voices that once rose, octave upon
octave, scampering over each other
like beetles climbing an old deserted ladder
dipped in fire-engine acrylic
freeze dried, brittle
challenging one another
like an iceberg to the titanic
heaving boot steps that reverberated down
three flights of sequestered apartment stairwell
steel toed plates clanging for
freedom, massive as the bell herself
and the wind, wind that rifled through her nightgown
eight years old, she shivers in the stark midnight air
that cuts sharply as an arrow whiz, grazing
an unsuspecting ear
bed sheets of security abandoned, to call
over eye-leveled rod iron railings, down
to the parkade, blacktop extended through
darkness, silent as a family dream ready to burst
the way a helium balloon faintly concedes
to flight, soft voice, velvet as a horse's mussel
yet with endless depth of a sea conch
to his ears, daddy, please don't go?