The Topography of Sex and Survival

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You were raised on the banks of the Missouri River. In the 1800s, it was a rough frontier, a gateway to the Wild West, the last stop accessible by rail until after the Civil War. It was the birthplace of the Pony Express and the city in which the outlaw, Jesse James, took his last breath.

Everyone grew up in the shadow of these things. Some people made it the thirty miles to Kansas City. Others never left the confines of St. Joe.

When you were fourteen, you learned that you could fly across the country and get nowhere. That your father might die suddenly. That you could be seduced by the sight of blood. That you romanticized death-by-cutting.

You entered puberty ill-prepared, a victim of molestation by a boy with a tumor in his brain. You secretly hoped he would die that fall, after he took you to the carnival and got jumped as you were getting off the Tilt-O-Wheel. How you turned your back and left him for dead.

But you were riddled with guilt and confusion. You were Catholic, after all, attended mass every Wednesday and Sunday, had been kicked out of two parochial schools by the end of eighth grade.

You watched a tarantula crawl across your ceiling the month you moved to the desert, your mother crushing its body with the handle of a broom. The Sonoran almost swallowed you when you rode your bike five miles in the middle of June. The natives worried you wouldn’t survive the summer.

You remained chaste as long as you could, which was longer than some but not longer than most. The summer before you lost your virginity, you let your friend, Bill, finger you every morning after your mother left for work. He was never your boyfriend, but he was athletic and smart, had a face riddled with acne. One night after dinner, his father made you watch the footage of a thing called Woodstock. You snickered and rolled your eyes, secretly reveling in the sight of all those naked, long-haired girls dancing in the field, their lithe bodies covered in mud and nipples and wreaths of flowers.

You had sex the following year and it was good, at least as far as you could tell. He was a Senior with a proclivity for physics, a pilot and the son of a Green Beret, a Vietnam vet who had a tumbler of chew on the side table next to his recliner. You almost drank it one night when you were watching a movie. Your body seemed new, alight with something you couldn’t name. He flew you around the city in a single-engine Cessna. He left for Annapolis at the end of the school year.

You dated a bodybuilder named TJ who made pizzas while you worked the door. He brought you brown rice after school, introduced you to Nirvana and the Smith machine. He took Polaroids of you in your string bikinis. You remember looking like a porn star for the first time in your life.

Then there was the transplant from Buffalo. He was barely literate, but you didn’t know it at the time. He had a penchant for violence, which you’d suspected since the day you saw the bruises on his last girlfriend’s arms. He fucked you in his mother’s closet, your vagina dry and chafing, her chunky heels digging into your spine. When you tried to leave him, he broke into your second-floor apartment and knocked your mother to the ground. He pushed you out of a moving car, down the hill that led to the tennis courts at school, onto his bed so he could violate you one more time. When you found out you were pregnant, your mother drove you to the clinic, rubbed your back in the waiting room, held your hair as you vomited the orange juice that the nurses made you drink.

Decades later, you learned that your grandmother’s name was Missouri. You were desperate to change your identity, rebirth yourself, become someone you weren’t but were possibly meant to be in an alternate reality—maybe the Wild West, maybe the festival you never attended during the summer of love.

You wonder if it’s best to shoot someone in the back before they know what’s coming. You wonder if survival requires pre-emptive measures. You wonder if anyone truly understands the civil war of the heart.

Rosemarie Dombrowski Contributor
Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of \ rinky dink press and Write On, Downtown: A Journal of Phoenix Writing, as well as the curator and host of the Phoenix Poetry Series and First Friday Poetry on Roosevelt Row. She is the recipient of five Pushcart nominations, a 2017 Arts Hero Award, and the 2017 Carrie McCray Award in Nonfiction. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies, The Philosophy of Unclean Things, and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition.
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1 Comment

  1. Powerful and beautifully written. I related to much of it, hard to read but impossible to look away. Thank you.

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