UNBIDDEN STONES       by Lisa Lutwyche

Listen, girl, you and I both know how it got there.

Remember when you used to get that big, tight knot of fear in your chest?

How strong it was?  Remember that hunted, haunted panic?

You were his quarry.  Trapped in those scolding, hypnotic eyes.

That feeling was so strong.

If you didn’t scream it out, the energy of all that terror had to go somewhere. 

If it went nowhere, it stayed inside.  Right where you said you felt it. 

It’s still in there, hardening.

He humiliated you in public places. 

In front of his friends, your friends, his family, yours. 

He diminished you in private.  He took you down to nothing.

He stripped you of all power in front of the children.

Is it any wonder they didn’t always listen to you?

How they learned to manipulate you?

There!  Where did you feel that? 

Waves of shame that caught in your throat and tore at your insides.

Sometimes, girl, didn’t you just get so angry?  You must have. 

Early you learned that if you threw a plastic tub of margarine,

(a harmless thing, with its lid on) he would probably

throw a crockery bowl, or a chair, or even a table. 

He would snort that righteous snicker (at how you lost control). 

He would leave you, all alone, to clean it up.

And you’d be trembling.  Back in your place.

But that rage was still in there, wasn’t it?  Seething. 

Your solar plexus was hot with it.

Energy that stayed inside you and turned to micro crystals,

which gathered into tiny pebbles,

grew to gravel and hung there, heavy, in your breasts.  

Until they saw it.  The doctor showed it to you. 

Surreal, sitting on her desk, behind it with her. 

Grease pencil marks on your blue breasts. 

Galaxies of tiny rocks, showing white,

floating in the utter dark universe of your internal tissues.

She told you the degrees of possibility, 

showed you the jagged clumps in right breast and in left. 

She told you what your options were.

And you told her, “cut them all out”.

You picture yourself as a quarry of a different kind now. 

You are a place that holds unbidden stones. 

They will scatter if you don’t stop them.

You will be a strip mine. 

You let the doctors do with you what they will.

You will be rid of the rubble that man left inside of you. 

Lighter, so much lighter.

Now, girl, you’ve started again. 

This man, the man who loves you, will be holding your hand.

He will not care that your breasts are dented, scarred,

even excavated.

It seems to you that he may love

even the craters they leave behind.