For Michelle
The brand new Ford Escort I rented
to drive her to Seattle, Washington.
Seattle, Washington, the restaurant
at Pikes Place Market, fish scales
and oysters on the half shell, slipped
down her throat, scent enough to gag.
Queasy at the top of the Space Needle,
she didn’t want to talk about it,
or get back in the Escort to return
to the Bayshore Inn. She wanted
to run, wanted only to run,
not away, she said, but to.
To what? I asked. She threw her
perfumed hair back and laughed
bull-headed, as I packed her bags.
I thought a long hike in the Cascades
with Outward Bound could free
her from the spiked stakes
plunged in her while she was still
a child. I thought
she would heal in the scent of earth
mulch and cedar boughs, could learn
to bend away from fatal thrusts.
She called the second day, wanting
to talk about the rental car.
She hated it, she said, because
it reminded her of moving
from one foster home to the next,
nothing to stake her future on,
just the smell of the State car
and a garbage bag of belongings
to accompany her. The place
at the top of the Space Needle
was too cramped, she said, men
leaned against her. She could smell
booze coming through their pores,
stale tobacco, dried cum on their
skin. It made hers crawl.
Her arms and legs tried to follow
some years later
after the odor of industrial ammonia
in Rosemont Girls’ Home,
after the smell of her own
breath, chalky from medications
they made her take, after her
daughter was born, her tears
and sweat as her body tore
open. She could smell her own blood
and urine, the antiseptic, and
baby Karina’s damp curls
coming out of the place where
her own had been shorn. Even
the soft smell of the baby’s head
after her first bath, the warm milk
letting down, didn’t clear
the gory scents she carried with her
from childhood: adult men
pressing against her bare skin.
The series of homes
she moved through: Christian,
Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness—
until she didn’t know what to believe
except what she had been taught
to play: the skin flute; and take,
methamphetamines; to dull senses
she wanted to forget. And they did
too, dull them, on the day her car
left the road at a slight curve,
plunging down an embankment, where
she lay trapped in the stench of her own
waste; ribbons of bloody handprints
blossoming into a red, red cape.