Give
By Michelle Askin



And I come from a city so holy the shopping store
break rooms are filled with a smell of fast food
and foreign prayers. So that now when I pass
an Anacostia alley and watch a bum grab a shoot up
needle from a McDonalds bag, I inhale the grease aroma
like it’s the Spanish rosary murmurs or wailing to Mecca
from cashier clerks. All those prayers flushed out
into the Potomac under the Woodrow Wilson Bridge,
under tires of gang bangers’ rumbling road cracks—
like a sound of ribcages crushed. And I inhale as I remember
the vaginal blood that swims through my thighs—
I am unclean. My sins are a great many.
For one, I hurt a friend: She was from the Philippines,
and one day I made the quarrel seem like her fault.
The boss took my side, and she knew it was because
I was American. Once before she asked if I was a virgin,
then said, Oh but I thoughtall American girls were…
But I wait for my husband too.I was 26 then.
She said it was tempting not to sleep
with a man, when she first came to stay
with her aunt in Bethesda and clean politicians’ homes—
Her cousins driving her to Georgetown night clubs
and those university boys wanting her so much.
But she loved God and then her husband, though
it hurt bad. But I was good. I didn’t cry. And I was
eighteen that sad evening when he closed down
the Ethiopian restaurant two hours early just to hold her
in his strong dark arms, take her away from that store,
then through hard hail he would have loved to hurt me with.
I knew this. I also knew my penance: the prayer
that as he moved in her that night, he was an angel’s breath
from the truest religion or the flapping of dove wings
opening the first orange morning of her life.

Michelle Askin's poems have appeared in Shaking Like A Mountain, Oranges & Sardines, PANK, The Oyez Review, and elsewhere. She currently resides in the Washington D.C metropolitan area.

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