Never such innocence again

by STEVEN McCORMOND I

While friends laughed and drank by bonfire

she walked into woods to urinate, was buttoning Levi’s when they cornered her, closed in, with laughs

like growls ofanimals. Whispered: Slut and whore

and come on baby, fuck me. Their words, the forking tongue the fist in the face. Too frightened to scream,

she was creature caught in headlights, Prey

mesmerized by the serpent’s eye. No escaping

the man-hard hands hooking for soft places

of her body, thighs and breasts and vagina

She tells this story. Says man and woman will never be equal because man will always be the stronger... she could not fight them. Will not let me hold her

II

I know women’s anger: I want to hunt the hunters

take their heads off with old Reggie Jackson Little League bat. Want to trap them,

stretch the fear out like a rubber band, snap it in their eyes

I know women’s anger. But can they know my shame?

My sex, my strength, become stiff fingers

groping out of darkness. Become a young woman’s

worst nightmare. I curse every man, I implicate myself

in their crime, because I have watched pornographic movies because to have left the room would have meant losing face among brothers. Because I have been a man of wolfish eye Because I have looked at a woman and seen only the flesh

In nightmares, I become those boys circling in woods violating other women their minds call whore, bruising finger marks in arms of wives.

Iam too much my father’s son,

too much every father’s son

Pretending the rhetoric of feminism

lying and believing myself

In the pit of my nightmare

I am just another cheap manipulator

with designs on the woman I hold

Just another patriarch

thirsting head