Face-to-face with a twenty dollar bill,
You imagine those bony fingers first separating
your hair, gently, then less so, grasping,
leveraging your head groundward. You can
smell him, all sweat and adventure, acrid.
You inhale deeply. You feel the stones
beneath you, your face in the grass, the dirt.
He bites. You surrender beneath the
crush of teeth on your shoulder. He stops, coughs
You look toward him just in time to see him spit
out mouthful of blood. Yours or his,
you don’t know. Then you feel those hands
Working at the bottom of your dress roughly
rolling it upwards to get at you. You smell him
more. You smell determination. Conquest.
You feel those bony hands, taking.