"Fractions" by Heidi Seaborn
Fractions
One in 16 American women’s first sexual intercourse experience is rape.
— JAMA Internal Medicine Study, September 2019
1/16
Before I was blonde as sunshine,
I was a strange girl
in a home of strangers,
schooled by a man
who called himself
Daddy.
I baked him a whole pie.
He sliced it into fractions —
The fruit softening
before the knife,
juice of furred berries blackening the tin.
I remember the next morning. When I opened the curtains —
the green garden dulled, as if someone hadn’t dusted.
Brambles thickened the chain link fence, berries fallen & rotting.
I’ve buried the memory like a bone.
2/16
I remember clumps of dandelions as if colored by a child.
Above, smudged Sky Blue and Baby Powder clouds.
Blue Jean cut offs. His skin was Lumber. I could pick him out of a Crayola box.
Even now decades later, when sometimes
I forget what happened yesterday —
Heidi Seaborn
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of the award-winning debut collection, Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019), and two chapbooks. Since Seaborn returned to writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two-dozen awards, and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, such as American Poetry Journal, Frontier, Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, MORIA, Penn Review, The Slowdown, and Tar River. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from NYU.
Headshot: Rosanne Olson
Photo Credit: Jackson Purcell