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YOUR CART

POETRY

Fugue

By Anna V.Q. Ross





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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.
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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.

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