Robin Percyz
IS IT CONSENT IF YOU DIDN’T SAY YES?
If you had to Jack Daniel’s the dyke unconscious in order to let a man enter without knocking and he still breaks into your dreams like flashbacks that you’re not quite having but they’re having you, a scene of your naked legs erect skyward like cry-less candlesticks in the backseat of someone’s car and you’re unsure if you’re mid-dream or crawling out of anesthesia from the dull pain of the jabbing in your cervix like a key that can’t unlock the “yes” you didn’t say, or the stubble cheeks sandpaper, a razor blade rug burn on your groin and thighs, until you hear a nightingale singing but it’s your best friend wading across the glass window in the murky sea of 4am outside this car that’s parked in front of the bar where everybody knows your name, when her singing crescendos to yelling into dragging and she’s wrestling with your pants and underwear like your mom dressing you for the first day of Kindergarten in your favorite ruffled white skirt with lace and stockings and you don’t know what’s happening but you know that you only remember this memory from the mouth of your friend or maybe the mouth of the animal between your slippery legs that you’ve spent years trying to mop up the fact that they were not made wet by you but from the saliva of a guy who was maybe equally inebriated, so you play devil’s advocate for the devil and you don’t call it the “R” word because it’s sort of not, but you can name it a still-life nightmare that wakes you twenty years later, when a thief in the night burglarized your muted body and snatched your choice.
Is it consent if you didn’t say yes?
When Steven Calls from Prison
Steven is 35 years old and has already spent half of his life
clutching a pay phone
on Christmas morning to call Mama and Stephanie.
When Steven calls from prison, Mama feels him in her womb
like when she fled the Dominican Republic.
He was a mischievous toddler. Gleaming
brown eyes, two bowls of Mama’s sancocho.
Not double bullet holes
on the taxi driver’s arm.
When Steven calls from prison, Stephanie and Mama always answer.
The phone lines are a one-way street,
a car chase going in the wrong direction.
“An inmate from Shirley Correctional Facility is calling, do you accept the charges?”
That lifeless, monotone automated voice, part of the family. A Tia.
He once spent an entire year in solitary confinement.
Three months longer than he spent in Mama’s womb.
Steven wrote letters, sent drawings, and rhymes for his rap songs.
He could spit lyrics on the spot,
faster than a runaway
car carrying a stolen
Ruger semi-automatic gun, 7 grams of Fentanyl, and 42 grams of cocaine.
He was slick. Smooth.
He was gonna be somebody.
When Steven calls from prison, Mama runs
to get the phone past her coffee table
lineup of photographs from Christmas visits in jail.
Mama steals last words before the ten-minute call dies.
Handcuffed to the phone, a prisoner herself
always waiting.
Nobody loves Steven like Stephanie.
Big brother. Hermano.
Now they wrestle through radio waves, not the carpet of the housing projects.
They tell jokes. Punchline always interrupted by Tia,
“you have 30 seconds remaining.”
Only he could unlock
the bars that detained Mama’s
acceptance of Stephanie
who only brought girlfriends home from college.
When Steven calls, he is our defense team.
Now he has two hermanas.
He litigated for our love.
We trusted
that he would walk
Stephanie down the aisle
if he was free,
even if we couldn’t always trust him.
Steven was guilty.
He stole, did drugs, dealt, lied,
wounded his familia.
But when Steven calls, his laughter permeates
the apartment like slow-cooked
roast pernil on Christmas Day.
Together. Just for the ten minute call.
Sometimes when Mama bangs her spoon against the arroz con pollo,
flashbacks trigger
cops at the door snatching her baby.
When Steven calls, the ringing no longer sirens.
It’s birthday music.
Balloons are filled with helium hope.
Mama blasts bachata to deafen
the agony that Steven might never
put flowers on her grave.
When Steven calls from prison,
you can hear Mama scream, “mi hijo,”
like the day he entered her world.
Robin is a queer writer living in the New York Metropolitan region, spending the majority of her career as a Content Manager. As a member of The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, she presented her piece, “Boxing and Bleeding” at their Conference “Re: Cycling” in 2011. She was a competitive amateur boxer for four years, fighting twice in the New York Daily News Golden Gloves Competition. Robin has recently discovered her love for writing poetry, after years of admiring it as a reader. If she can help others feel visible through her work, she will consider that success.