[“Not all scars/are permanent,” is the balm of the story Cabrera illustrates
over the course of this reflection on navigating a world with men who attempt
to assert their desires and lustful wishes on the poem’s speaker and other bodies
like theirs. — KC]
There is the movement I make and the shadow
of that movement and the memory of movement
which stays in the room for a while like lights-gone-off
burned into the backs of your eyelids. Not all scars
are permanent. Maybe I am walking at a pace
that makes me invisible to you. Maybe I have fixed
my hair a few times. For work I dress chin to ankle
and still my body can be too much. Still the old man
at the supermarket insists on bringing our cart out
so he can encourage me to get pregnant. He says,
sometimes you go to sleep at night and then wake up pregnant.
Sometimes we have met somewhere in two separate
cars and we must drive home separately so I cannot
keep telling you what I heard on the radio. And anyway,
we hear new things. Your body moves through the world
and my body moves through an entirely different
world, though we can see each other mostly the entire time.
