the 'd' word

when i was seven years old, my mother, tear-streaks
drying on her cheeks, fingered her wedding band
and told me, “love hurts, sweetie,
that’s how you know it’s a good love.”
two days later, my father came back home.
he was missing his wedding ring
and when he left again,
he left a handprint on my mother’s cheek
that she carried with her even after the bruise was gone.

i grew up without a father influence in my mother’s world
and without a mother influence in my dad’s.
neither of them got remarried.
they had found each other and that was enough.
they had found each other and that was too much.

i grew up a thin string attaching one man and one woman
together in a way arguments and resentment could never snap.
they met in restaurant parking lots and in the bleachers
of my soccer games the way soldiers meet on battle fields,
trading me across the asphalt and steel like a
deadly weapon, a bullet hurdled back and forth.

he took me out to ball games but never for the right teams
and never called me his daughter,
like i was some community service project he worked
a weekend each month.
and he never called me on Christmas
maybe there wasn’t room in his life for Jesus,
like there wasn’t room in it for me.

i grew up knowing what seats in a court room felt like
and in what ways the word divorce, if flung just right,
can cut across the skin of the wrist and wipe away
the laugh lines on grown-ups’ faces.

i grew up hauling around a weekend bag and missing something
i never really figured out was never mine to have.
i bruised the tips of my ears with every
mean word i heard them say about each other,
and my friends would ask me which parent i hated more
and i never could find the words to tell them
i was tired of all the hate and i liked it best
when i was six years old
and my father came home from work and kissed my mother
and they tucked me in together and held hands in public.

back when mothers didn’t tell their daughters
to identify true love by the amount of agony it caused you
in order to try and convince themselves that
their husbands loved them more than
anything in the world and their daughters were their daughters
and not weapons of war, bullets zinging into
the sore spots that never completely healed.

the first time i ever made my mother cry
was when i asked her if i could go live with my father.
she sat down at the dining room table
and rubbed her empty finger and looked
around her empty house and sobbed and
and i went to my room and i stared at the wall
and i stared at the floor and at my bed and at the window

and the funny thing is, no one ever thinks
about how the bullet feels when it hits the flesh.