Bedtime Story

My father rapes me every night and I cry.

I don’t like him in my bed—until I do.

Poor child, so young, no voice, only

legs spread, open and aching, I grow to love him.

He yanks his pajama bottom strings

leaving me alone in a puddle of goo.

 

Leaving me alone in a puddle of goo,

he yanks his pajama bottom strings.

Legs spread. Open and aching. I grow to love him,

poor child, too young. No voice. Only

I don’t like him in my bed until I do.

My father rapes me every night, and I cry.

Viriginia Sutton

Virginia Chase Sutton’s chapbook, Down River, was published last fall. Her second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, won the Morse Poetry Prize and is being re-issued by Doubleback Books. Embellishments is her first book and Of a Transient Nature is her third. Seven times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have won a Poetry Scholarship at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and the National Poet Hunt. Poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, Comstock Review, Laurel Review, and Peacock Journal, among many other literary publications, journals, and anthologies. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, with her husband.