In the Alley

by Brett Rutherford

Somewhere in Union City
on a pot-holed side street
I stumble upon a crime scene.

It is not yet seven. No one
has entered the alleyway
that fronts the auto shop.
No one has seen her, naked,
flattened, it seems, by tires
that crushed her this way
and that. Her toothless mouth
is agape in the permanent “oh”
that must have frozen there
as she knew there’d be no mercy
from the circle of attackers.

The thing her mother told her
never to show to strangers
now greets the pigeons, the clouds,
and the imminent sun-rays.
She is so torn it seems
that dogs, and not a pack of men
had been at her. Her legs
are still apart, her shoes
might be some blocks away.

Running this way at midnight
she would have found no shelter.
The chain-link fence, the ripple
of the closed and corrugated shutters
gave her no place to hide.

They had all the time in the world.
No one would hear her. One by one
they did as they wished with her,
then, lighting one another’s cigars,
they left. The moon watched
and sank, too shamed to speak.

Next week, the men will take
among themselves a collection,
a pay-day self-tax for future pleasure.
Down at the pink-lit adult arcade
they will purchase another
whose toothless mouth will never
refuse them, whose legs
are always open, whose breasts
remind them
of one another’s younger sisters.
There is a place on her back
where you pump the air in.
With luck she might last
an hour in the parking lot,
before she’s done for,

hissing out her last,
late night’s love-doll,
inflatable woman.