The Middle East
My parent's friends had left for the year
The silence echoed through the city
I didn't hear it
No one to watch out for me
But I didn't think I needed protection

I wasn' t aware
Like a deer grazing blissfully
in the gunsite of a hunter
Then he struck
it wasn't a clean ****
everyone saw
but no one did anything
there were different rules there
men do these things
wait it out, or leave

Hide the evidence
Just leave, he said
like, walk out the door and
hop on a plane to San Jose
like catching the subway in New York

Or like putting the body in cement boots and dump it in the river
I was stunned
who was this man?
he looked like the man in the wedding pictures,
my husband

The body stayed there for a few months more
To him, evidence
rotting, stinking
being noticed
talking
living
showing off a rotted trail of abuse and scabs
trying to come to terms with its destroyed life
wrapping its mind around how twelve years
could wind up like this
"I'm sorry it had to end this way,"
the American husband said
in his new form, a crude sketch of what
he thought was Israeli
what he thought he could get away with
here

then I was gone
the evidence disappeared
He painted the apartment
like a crime scene made fresh
and blamed me that the landlords
weren't friendly to him

Hours later, with the help of an airplane
I was back in a world
where these things aren't tolerated
Women don't have to cower and
wait it out in a cosmopolitan city
where jets fly overhead so high
you can't see them
Shivering, fearful, trying to hide the trauma
pretend it was just a normal divorce
How could anyone believe what happened?