Self-Fulfilling

 

Self-FulfillingShe has decided what I am already:
screaming help inside the ordinary
morning, victim of my own sharp history
or of her hands—it hardly matters which.
The prophecy arrives before the fact,
a story she repeats until it sticks.
You know the kind: the woman who is cracked
open like a sidewalk after frost,
who needs her, always, to interpret it. In the kitchen, coffee bitter as the joke
she makes about my nerves, I watch her talk.
Her voice lays down the law of how I broke
before I broke. The milk goes sour in the cup.
I feel the scream rise like a bus exhaust
in winter air—metallic, visible,
impossible to swallow or exhaust. She calls it love, this naming of the wound
she needs me to inhabit. If I stand
too straight, she finds the fracture anyway,
a self-fulfilling tightness in my hand.
Last night I dreamed I shouted till my throat
was raw, and woke to find her smiling, proud:
See? I knew you needed me. The note
of triumph in her voice was almost loud. What is the prophecy but this closed loop—
I am the victim she requires me to be
so she can be the one who hears me scream
before the sound has left my mouth, or me.