I’m standing in line behind a mother,
tired with another Tuesday grocery routine,
and her two sons.
The eldest practices his best pre-teen nonchalance
just inside her protective glare.

The youngest is begging, pulling left handed
on the tail end of his mother’s work shirt while his right hand,
still soft and plump,
holds fast to a red wrapper, wrinkled with want.

Skittles and I’m nauseous.
I’m sick, sweating and hot—
dizzy with memories I thought I had drowned
like bastard kittens, bagged and weighted with bricks,
flung from the one black train trestle out of town.

With fewer years alive than fingers on one small, shaking hand,
I’m trapped in the cab of a ’73 Ford pick-up.
Vomit green, it reeks of hot vinyl sticking to the back of my throat,
chewing tobacco, and Knoxville red clay.

The engine stumbles to a stop
with the sharp jingle of keys in the ignition
while the humid summer heat reaches bent fingers
through mud speckled glass to writhe on my skin.
Every pretense of my first four-wheel drive in the woods is gone.

The heat twists there like the guilt and the fear in my gut
and over miles and years I hear a stepfather’s voice say
“I promise, it tastes just like Skittles.”
His words come through tobacco-soaked syllables.

But with his flesh in my mouth,
and his cum in my throat there is no rainbow here.
No sun dares to paint a prism shine on these grey clouds,
the ones that hang like bad curtains in cheap motels.

There is just me,
eighteen years later, waiting in line,
afraid of being touched by anyone.