Storyteller

by Laura Morefield

 

There is a scar on her right hand—hidden
by maturity’s gift of wrinkles, freckles, the prominent
veins and tendons of a writer’s tool in trade.

For years, it was a story illustration,
to amaze the listener with two inches of Frankenstein
crosshatches on the back of her hand

and the smaller, inch-long, irregular half moon
where the pitchfork burst all the way
through her ten-year-old skin

and into the dirt clod he’d claimed as his own.
It was a tale told, retold, sanctified
at various times into a tenuous kinship with the scars

on Jesus’ hands.  She spoke less often
of the nightmare where she reaches to open the back door
with the wounded hand and the knob

slips through the red gap in her flesh, leaving her helpless—
captured by the very wound she wants their mother
and father to bind.  With him, still behind

her in the dark.  Pitchfork in hand.  And it goes
without saying that she never mentioned the
other things.  Things more dire, less apt to be

accidental.