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Can you tell us what you don’t forget?
the senator’s voice repeats on the radio. It’s rush hour, Boston, I-93, driving home from dance class with my daughter in the back seat, her twelve-year-old legs stretched into pink Body Wrappers brand spandex as she wonders aloud what we’re going to eat for dinner. Air brakes wheeze, then release beside us as a bus muscles past, and should I change the station when the senator’s voice repeats Can you tell us what you don’t forget? above the traffic—rush hour, Boston, I-93, my daughter stretched in the back seat. Girl whose body I once unwrapped from mine, is she listening as now the woman speaks? I was pushed onto the bed. His weight was heavy. I shake my head—Boston, rush hour, I-93— as if I could swerve by what edges up in me. He put his hand over my mouth. It was hard for me to breathe. Boston, rush hour, I-93, but I’m cruising a suburban street of dandelion lawns, legs the same age as my daughter who jams her knees against my seat when I hit the brakes as one last car squeezes in ahead of me. Can you tell us Boston, rush hour. I-93 is fixed to a grid of red what you don’t forget? taillights that bleed their afterimages in repeating Can you green against gray sky. I’m tired, forget picturing my bed back home what you don’t quilt pulled tight against the sheets Can you don’t forget or is it that other bed what you and what year was it forget don’t what day don’t Can you forget how tell us don’t tell what did he what Can you forget don’t tell us touch me? I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit. I believed he was going to rape me. Boston, rush hour, I-93, a taillight flickers, horns begin to beep, How many times will I repeat this drive? Mom? When are we going to move? her voice reaches toward me, and I ease my weight up off the brake, considering the question. The miles, like bodies, fall between us and what I don’t forget here in Boston, rush hour, I-93, driving home from dance class with my daughter in the back seat. |
About This Unit: Poems on Family and Finding Other Lines of Symmetry |
ANNA V.Q. ROSS’s most recent book, Everything But the Sea, won the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2022. Her work has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Fulbright Foundation, and appears in the Nation, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor for Salamander, teaches at Emerson College, and lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she runs the performance series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.
