The letters were splayed, were splashed,
were sprayed in a hurry from a thin paint can
on the playground where I’d learned to run
from boys who wanted to knock me down.
Four letters, but it wasn’t kiss,
it wasn’t love with a heart around it,
it wasn’t okay or pink or kind
or any word I’d ever seen
but only heard as Satan’s whisper
tickling my older brother’s ear
as he reached for the dirty part of me
that had no language to say no.
Katharyn Howd Machan’s most recent publication is A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. A professor in the Writing Department at Ithaca College in central New York State, she served as Tompkins County’s first poet laureate.