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©2009 Angelic Dynamo
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A Memory by Amy Rollinson

The bruises have faded
like stars burning out, but still
I find myself staring
into the December sky, shivering

and feeling the cold
of the cement floor
in the basement—
lights off, door locked
sobs silenced by a baseball game,
the television turned up.
Two strikes, one out
and sitting under a table,
I yearn for my mother
to come home early from work.
Tracing the sting
with my fingertips,
I feel the flesh on my legs rise
seeing the leather belt
behind my eyelids.

Sometimes: I want
to forgive and forget
but on a night like this

where I am alone and drunk
I feel like I am in that cellar

scared to come out from hiding
like a wounded animal wondering
what it was I did wrong while my father
ill, old and almost blind, still sips
his whiskey and waits for his body
to rot, alone in the house I grew up in.


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