The man rips back a fistful of her hair
and it flares into barbs.
Like that, his fist shreds. She dashes
but his screams ring
the alley with no doppler
downshift, she flees at the speed of normal panic
while his left hand cradles his wrecked right:
last fist it’ll ever make
to raise for breakaways
or saviors, to clutch a fork
or forge a check, offer a balloon to a child
or teach its mother a lesson. These things
don’t happen, but here she is next week
leaning against her school locker,
barbed hair snagged in the vents.
It occurs to kids who pass that they could help
but they’re terrified to touch her.
She wonders herself
about contagion, never trusts
the blood she shampoos each morning
from her scalp. She learns to sleep
light, balanced gently on the pillow
so her neck grows oddly muscled from this posture
as its skin thickens, coarsens.
She wonders why barbed wire?
Why didn’t her hair turn asps or blaze
but in the asking she knows, pictures
a huge pink bunny on whose lap
her mother once sat her at the mall, the hard clod
digging into her leg. Glaring back
into its plastic face, she’d found
two eyes burning between the smiling lips
and thought of the lust of rabbits, the greed
of rabbits who ravish gardens in tales,
against whom farmers raise sharp fences.
But the man in the alley wore no mask.
Bitch he’d spat
as he grabbed for the head she’d dared
to turn away, and bitch again
as he crouched over the flesh
she’d wrecked, as if she could command
all the iron in her blood to rush
to her split ends and steel into thorns.
Though the resulting anemia would explain a lot –
a blanched complexion people come to read
as goth, the midday faintness that bids her bend
her head against the locker
from which she finally comes unpinned.
Inside she finds a comic left
for her, X-Men # 171, with a startled heroine
circled on the cover, and flipping through
she finds this woman (Rogue)
is death to touch, drains soul and force
at the slightest brush of skin,
a power the hero cannot alter
and did not choose. It makes instant sense:
the girl knows she has no magic, her hair is fixed
in these barbs, can’t switch to springs or sprigs,
she’ll never sprout new limbs or blade her tongue:
the agency was his. Where did he get it,
this power? Who else has felt it?
But though her eyes dart for signs she’ll never
see the man again. That’s her story,
and though wishing is impotent,
I’d never wish it on anyone. But I’d wish it
for my friend’s sister, grabbed at eleven.
And I’d wish it for my niece,
who had no hidden spines or quills
to ward away her stepfather’s fingers.
I wish it for her voice to flash forth after,
to bind him in wire
though it dredges her marrow to speak.
