That chapped and battered
white-trash face,

bone-tired and bleak with hate--
raised on baked clay, pressed

out of your sister's sharp
bruised hips--

left the jurors cold.
They needed melting, tears,

some soft female thing
to pardon and imprison.

Your voice was flat and dark,
plain and hard as slate:

long remorseless
shadows under your eyes.

They saw a dyke
and a roadside whore.

Something half-human:
a monstrous birth

that should never have survived
its circumstance.

           II

The jurors went home nervous to their wives.
I hope the nightmares chased them for years

north from Florida, along the highways
into the urinals, with their machines

that spit out brittle rubbers for a quarter:
flat boxes pasted with a cardboard girl

pursing her lips for a sticky blow-job.
You did it off the road, where scrub and clay

smothered the john's grunts and blows.
Afterwards you pissed into the dust.

           III

It's getting late. I walk home kicking
glass shards that ring against the pavement,
past the swing sets and climbing frames

where my neighbor was raped. Boys
hid in the painted concrete tubes
and danced out with a knife: broad daylight.

But for you that was common as a slap.
You were a park bench carved full of scars,
a rest stop with the doors torn off the stalls.

You were a dirt road beaten flat.
All it took was one hard wind to whip
you into a sharp, blinding cloud.

No. You were a woman in your thirties,
exhausted and bitter beyond hope
of pardon. What was left were deep-set bones,

a broken snarl, a trigger. And your wife.
When the police pretended to accuse her,
you handed yourself in to save her life.

           IV

It's too dark for walking; it's too late
for mercy. All I want
is to get home in one piece tonight,

and to know Lee Wuornos is alive:
rolling a cigarette, pacing in her cage.
Not this dead woman crouching in my bones

and muttering--her nerves like twisted wires,
her life beyond redeeming. Lee,
help me find a way back. Help me

make something of this. All I have
is brute tribe loyalty and choked rage:
no gun, no target, no words to explain.

MINDS INNOCENT AND QUIET

            for N.

Clumsy at two, I slipped in the tub and cut
my chin wide open. Bright blood ran
into the tepid water. My parents took their child
and rushed her into strangers' hands
and a straitjacket. Did I feel pain?
All I remember is that I was bound,

and enraged at being bound,
while the doctor fumbled to stitch the cut.
That choked fury was worse than pain.
If only I could have kicked or bit or run,
or flailed out with heavy boxers' hands.
But I was no athlete. I was a sort of child.

When I was nine--my parents' smallest child--
I had dark wet thoughts of women bound,
exposed, and tortured in strangers' hands.
On pains of being shot or choked or cut--
or simply bound too tight to kick or run--
their helpless shame was more acute than pain.

For seven years I sank into my pain
like a deep chill bath. From grim child
to dismal adolescent, I ran
into trouble, or made my own. Bound
for hurt, I took razor blades and cut
my legs and arms, with shaking hands.

Then the change came. I held the world in my hands.
Ecstatic, beyond all thought of pain
or price, I knew at last I'd cut
the bonds that held me. No longer a child,
but free as children are supposed to be, I'd bound
higher than I'd ever imagined, run and run

and run and run and run and run
until I ended up in strangers' hands
with my wrists and ankles bound
carefully, so as not to cause pain.
For two months I was penned in like a child
until the strands of resistance were cut.

* * *

Last night I dreamed you ran to me and cut
the bounds of my flesh. The pain
was not so bad. These are not the hands of a child.

Orton home page

Poetry, Part I

Poetry, Part III

Poetry, PartIV