Cinthia
Ritchie
is a features writer and columnist at the Anchorage
Daily News.
Credits include: New
York Times Magazine,
Water-Stone
Review,
Rainbow
Curve,
PMS
poemmemoirstory,
Ginbender
Poetery Review,
Wicked
Alice,
Slow
Train Literary Journal,
Stirring,
Ice
Floe: International Poetry of the Far North,
Conspire,
Poems
Niederngasse,
Sunspinner,
Nerve
Cowboy
and Women
of the Web Poetry Anthology.
Cinthia Ritchie
Saving Graces
These are safe places,
she whispered as we sank
down deep in hay,
scratchy hurt but good, good.
Pressing the Batman ring in my hand,
dark hair leaning toward me.
It came with the cereal, she whispered,
lived for months among sugary flakes
and therefore is holy.
Later she wrote
our rules down
on white school paper,
poked my finger with an old
cow bone, dripped blood,
mine hers red and salty.
We sucked the small cuts.
It felt wicked good, she said,
winking. She knew how to do that:
yes, just like that.
The barn was
safe.
So were the fields, at least around
the cows, but not the woods,
except Tuesdays and Thursdays
and sometimes Saturdays,
the house when he was gone,
and we relaxed, ran around, screamed
and stuck bobbie pins
into electrical sockets,
loving that jolt spark pain
running up fingers, wrists,
teeth, we closed our eyes,
savored.
At night we
recited
the rules like a holy chant:
barn fields woods
over and over until it became
the lie we knew it was, false
stuttering smells and stink.
He kept coming in,
ugly hands folding back
blankets, we learned to play dead,
chase our minds out to fields,
swimming through sun wind rain.
It always felt good to wash afterward.
Before sleep, we
knelt down together.
Our Father, Hail Mary,
our hands praying pale flickers
of comfort no one else granted:
honey sweetie child girl,
fluttering and rising until
it felt like a bird flying down
and grabbing my heart,
beating hot red hurt but soaring
off to the moon,
dropping down among cool shadows,
silver good alien blood
and safe, yes, safe as death.
