Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals Read Online Free PDF Page A

his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
    The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
    OK, the rape joke is that he worshipped The Rock.
    Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.
    The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.
    The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s
My Century
, which he never even tried to read.
    It gets funnier.
    The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.
    The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!
    The rape joke is that he was your father’s high school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.
    The rape joke is that he knew you when you were twelve years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.
    The rape joke is that
come on
, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.
    The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.
    The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.
    Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.
    You know the body of time is
elastic
, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.
    The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
    The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
    It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.
    The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.
    The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.
    The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.
    The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
    The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for