After San Diego, I Was a Whore Forever
By: Loukia Borrell
Poetry Bus Magazine
November 2023
You wouldn’t believe how serious we were.
We parked outside an office building near
the Norfolk airport and thought about how
to kill you. We considered ambushing you
at home, pistol-whipping you with your own
gun, the one you kept under my side of the bed.
For once in our lives, we would be in control.
We thought about hiring a sniper team to do it,
or letting you live. Get a trained commando to give
you a memorable beating, complete with
kicks to the nuts and blows to the head that
would leave you bloodied and weak.
This option was only good if you were beaten
well enough to lose a testicle. Or both.
We never did anything, though we wanted
to and spoke of it occasionally, usually over
beers and chimichangas at Chi-Chi’s,
or late nights leaning against the
Buick, smoking cigarettes, when I’d ask how
long it was going to take me to forget you.
I struggled through the AIDS tests, unanswered
letters to San Diego, phone calls that always
went straight to the answering machine.
Those were never acknowledged either.
My mother’s stony silences eventually erupted
into stinging rebukes, ending with the theory
that there probably wasn’t a man alive who hadn’t
spent time on top of me. I was a silly, shallow,
aimless, reckless playgirl. Then, she’d get on the
phone and tell the whole story again to her sister in Jersey.
This happened more than once. I only flinched the first time.
You kept the negatives. Said you would use them
if I got out of control. I stayed in my lane, but for many
years, it seemed that the strong winds that lashed me, tearing
and burning my skin, always blew in from the West.
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