Father-Daughter Dance

I once made a stranger bleed out from his eyes After transcribing his skeleton, and then reading His scratched-up bones back to him. I was thirteen when it happened, English class When I first realized how a tension can be pulled From the hoard of another's burden, no need For subtlety, even by accident people are dying To tell their secrets. It's scribbled all over them. I just hadn't realized To decipher it is a gift, a homemade yoke of one-sided, Double-bound heroism, wherein the villain is Eviscerated and simple, usually It's trying to convince the crowd that gets you. My father hated me for it—creating context Drawing attention with an unabashed ask Based on noticing, saying out loud what was written On the face of a person; the collective Noun for questions should be called an Innocence Since the price of why is too much—too often It's an unasked-for Experience Why don't you get your teeth fixed? I was so excited For my father when I said it, not knowing Low-income housing, or anything of adolescence when these kinds of corrections usually happen I was six, and since Ki-hwan next door Had just gotten braces, kindergarten logic led— to my father hitting me hard on the back of my neck, He called me an ******* for exposing him. This is not hyperbolic, it's literally what happened; I just Kept living life, with the embarrassment of a broken toddler Being my dad, hiding so many sins, not all mentioned, So many others— I like to think I've won in the ways he was always too small To see, that ******* showed me how to keep it moving No matter the damage—just because For the sake of his stepfather’s name, that was the template. But I am a woman of a right-now-enduring existential shame For the crime of not knowing the age of orthodontia, let alone A moment of tenderness that might have saved us both, Or had a shot at expunging this right-here moment Of being an *******, saturated with a father's impression, Boggy as the blood-soaked prostate of a long-dead man, Surely, I will get over him.