Claude spreads the legs of his first girlfriend and
Recognizes the in-between
From his sister’s.

She was seventeen and silent;
He, six and sobbing,
Pushing the bamboo deeper
After
The men who ate
Dinner with his father
The week before
Told him to.

They said he had to **** her; said
He was a Tutsi, and limp, and finally,

“Farther!”

She was wet with blood and he with tears
Crouched down in the grass.

At twenty-one,
Claude hovers above
His first love
With closed eyes and dry cheeks.
She is wet, with want, and
Whimpering.

Not from
A stick’s broken branches,
Or twelve men
Holding her knees apart
“Showing a cockroach how it’s done,”
One by one
Ants crawling toward her blood.

Claude hears her closed-lip whimpers,
Says how much he’ll always love her, and
Cannot come.