Tonight's Poet Corner: Galvanized Rust

Galvanized Rust
by Belinda Roddie

My fingers got caught in the chain link
fence by your father's hellhole of a house.
I tore them away when I heard the sirens,
and the blood around my cuticles matched
the glow of the howling lights. I had come
to check on you only to see you as a fresh
cadaver instead. I didn't feel any pain
in my hand; I was too distracted for that.

You told me five years ago, over coffee,
that your dad would never touch you again,
that all that time in a cold cell with
a tiny window that had a bad view of the bay
was enough to sober his abusive ass up.
No more drinking, you said confidently. No
more fighting. No more threats. No more
contusions found on your mother's back like
when you counted her moles as a child. They
had made such a pretty map to nowhere.

I heard my knuckles squeal against the woven
steel as I attempted to free my swollen joints
from the tangle of metal molars. I thought
for a moment that you had called my name from
your bedroom, but the gurgling in my head
was too damn loud. Sounded like running water;
really was the crescendo of my blood flow. The
river of life that we had once both swam in.
I had saved you from drowning once, when you
slipped into a void of dark rushing water. Pulling
you from its maw was like defying the snapping
mandible of a frustrated god deprived of his dinner.

They carried you out in a stretcher, a stained
blanket covering your broken head. Your father
moaned like a wounded animal as the police cuffed
him while he was still in a fetal position on the porch.
I cradled my bleeding fingers against the folds
of my coat and felt nothing but the chill. The fence
rattled a cheap funeral dirge for you in the wind.
You had fallen into the whirlpool again. This time,
I couldn't resuscitate you. Not like this. Not like this.