Whenever a man follows me too close,
I think of my Nana scrubbing out my father’s mouth
with clementine soap, like a mudslide in frosted tip
southern California, just after the Ham Man stopped
by on Christmas Eve to deliver their annual lump
of cinnamon crusted gorgeous fat—
how when anonymous footsteps don’t pass
me on the sidewalk but shuck themselves into shadows
I replay my father punching through his sister’s
Brady Bunch drum set, his bottom lip the border
between pleasure & punishment, that smirk before
suds swallowed, the purpling passed down paint-by-number
of our family’s jawbones canoeing around each other
but the water is frozen, the water is frozen.