Many people spend their lives battling with demons
Drugs
Themselves
The past
My father, he battled alcohol
And my mother, well, she battled him

She fought with her life to give me mine
As he beat her down
And beat her up
He held my life in his hands
Clenched in his fists

She stood at the top of our staircase
Somehow never afraid of this man she loved
He was filled with delusions
Fueled by liquor
As he drunkenly climbed the stairs
Toward where she stood
Screaming obscenities
About her infidelity
He knew why she had done it
He had chosen drinking over his family
And so she had chosen another man
But there they both stood
My mother with her hand on her swollen stomach
And my father with his hand through the plaster wall
Until his head became so clouded
That his hands reached my mother
The poison pulsed through his veins
And the venom became blows to her body

She shielded her abdomen
As his hands made contact
Rattling the quiet, liquid world that I lived in
With my twin
The war was waged against us
Because we did not belong to him
Because we did not belong
To him.

He fought himself
By attacking his mistakes
Not cognizant that we
—innocent and unknowing—
Would be unable to fix his pain
But he fought anyways
To destroy us
As if our disappearance
Would erase his fault

Exhausted from fighting
He fell to knees
As tears fell down my mother’s face
And blood dripped down her inner thigh

Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to feel loss
Before you feel existence
Sometimes I wonder if I knew
That my life could have been taken away
As easily as my twin’s
That my life was at the mercy of a man
Before my heart beat on its own
But I remained
And the strength of my mother
Granted me access into this world
This world where men fight their demons
And women fight for their voices
Not realizing that their own demons
Rest their heads on the pillow next to them