This poem begins with When the mirror sliced my daughter's thigh and the reader (at least this reader) suspects an accident. The poem opens beautifully, like a flower, to describe the flowering layers of blood and glass. The wound heals and leaves a scar, the girl is ashamed and at the pool she tries the hide her scar with a splayed-out hand and then we get a hint of something more sinister in the genesis of this scar with
hurts me the way her puppy's back-end wiggle
signifies a fear of men, and ignites a little narrative
in my mind: some creep with a beer in his hand
batting around a five pound pup, and thinking it's funny.
In the second strophe there are more hints, allusions to N feeling like a pervert for peeking a look at her daughter's scar when she is sleeping, N's stomach bottoming out, and the Almighty/ hung back, masquerading as a dark deity, a complicated god/who would hold a small child hostage and torture her mother./Now it will take a long time to fasten him back where he belongs.
There is just enough here, enough imagery - puppy, flowers, glass, Almighty - husband, father, lover? who turns on woman and child, to intrigue and frighten.
The narrator here has an interesting mixture of anger and vicarious guilt for the horrible things other men have done to women, and children, and puppies. It must be a rough set of emotions to grapple with. Everybody's got their own gender baggage, but I still don't envy him.
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