Four Poems by Harriet Levin Millan

An Updated Definition of Rape

I am the girl who trusted her math tutor
when we sat side-by-side. Picture

the equation, up until this point,
I was not strong enough to prove.

I am the girl who thrusted forward negligible answers
on paper, a calculator wedged between my thumbs.

I acted on all the right answers. Girl who heard no singing
from upstairs. No landlady to offer tea or biscuits.

Girl who trusted math, whose father is a math whiz,
blackboards overrun with formulas in his downtown office.

I am the girl who once asked her father how gravity works
and why we don’t fall off the tilted side of the earth.

What keeps us here? I still need to know
how the earth holds me when I want to go.

Girl getting up from her seat. Girl facing wall,
tutor, his questions not having to do with math.

There are stars that have less and less to do with light
strewn across the sky in the shape of bears, belts, horseshoes.

She drove to his apartment with her new license.
Edging sixty mph on the Schuylkill.

Passing trucks with their headlights blinking.
Girl sitting on a pillow for her feet to reach the pedals.

Girl wearing braces on her teeth.
Morning girl who climbs up on the sink to clean the food

trapped beneath the silver. Evening girl whose boyfriend is waiting
for her to come over in her blue Toyota after this lesson. Girl

who is attracted to her tutor, but would not park
her Toyota outside his house for an indefinite amount of time,

distance or speed. Clearly getting up to leave. Pushed
down in her seat. Math tutor who knows the answers,

throwing her heavy textbooks off the table, slicking his black hair
back, wrinkling the clean white paper

where she scribbled her beautiful equations. Math tutor
wrestling her logic, his mind on numbers, the formulas

he reverses to apply to this situation: Loyal to your boyfriend, he says,
what are you, his dog? Girl who is attracted to tutor,

but that doesn’t mean she wants to fuck him,
plus, his breath smells,

too many cigarettes, too much coffee.
Girl who misses the cues when handed

a little clay pipe. Girl whose lungs fill with smoke, who at first
laughs when he chases her around the dining room table.

Are you kidding? But he’s not.
Stubs her toe. He pushes her down onto the shag carpet,

his hand too heavy on her back to rise.
This is when all the trouble with that toe began,

the nail detached from the skin
under her sock where she’s hidden it,

troubled this many years. Now that she’s exposed it,
what will happen? Will it heal?

*

In a Spider Web’s
Last Remaining Thread

Your forever touch,
thrumming in wind,
edging the circumference
of my purplish-brownish areolas
inherited from my Ladino line
fleeing the Inquisition,
the wick of the eternal
flame still taut in my blood.
This creepy dimensionless grip
hanging off the rain gutter
is not chiseled from stone
like the monuments in Tikal
set against the horizon
but is charged with the prophecies
you uttered and will ramble on
diffused in shreds
until I meet you
once again at the world’s end.

* 

All Real Communication is Vascular

We were once zooxanthellae living inside coral.
Love was a branching, leaning over sideways,

spilling out, sexy and sloppy—
hair in my eyes, my bra straps loosened in a spiraling breeze.

We spawned. The currents carried us.
We drifted away and surfaced on land

where we uttered vulgarities in our throaty dialect.
Uneasy on our feet, we became

filaments of our dreams.
We brought fruit to our god

instead of a blood-offering from our flocks.
We who were once sugared in rocky seabeds,

our eyes a bristling. No, it was never anger
smashing through us, calcifying our skin.

It was our tissue-like softness,
always our fragility that protected us.

* 

An Apology

It’s called making up, as if to say I’m
sorry is only imaginary, plucked

from an inner lining, silt-like
immersing this planet. And yet

making up dwells in solid constructions,
It’s what the slant in roofs do in snowstorms.

Piled-up insults slip to the ground
and melt, leaving another

raw winter gust to the eaves. It’s how
a trellis buffs up a rose bush. Yesterday,

as the gardener planted these roses,
he bent down low to inhale their scent. Not

a strong scent, he whispered.
Someone offers a thimbleful,

as the wind chime spins
from a hook a little higher up

to make a space.
I open my eyes, take the first step.

*

Harriet Levin Millan is the author of three books of poetry, The Christmas Show, which Eavan Boland chose for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and also won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Girl in Cap and Gown, a National Poetry Series finalist, and My Oceanography. Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run, was excerpted in The Kenyon Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches writing at Drexel University.