TRAUMA-INFORMED CARE

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Caravaggio’s David holds Goliath’s severed head.
One looks impassively at the back of the other, a moan
loosened from the giant’s slack lips, glassy eyes
howling. Across David’s thin chest, a shard of light
suggests a place behind him that light has never accessed.

In thick-windowed enclosures, they keep full-on
mountain lions at Six Flags. You shouldn’t tap the glass,
but people do, especially when they’re hiding but also
when they aren’t acting like they should. We want to see them,
sleek and shifting like sand, beige lances primed
between scrubby trestles of imported flora.

With our ergonomic shoes and space-age ice cream, we believe
too much in our own sanity. There has always been a story
where the lion eats the boy, or the whale eats the man, or
the flood eats the world. A mountain plinth for offerings
in blood. You consider your own severed head held in front of you.

We aren’t lashed to this flaming rock by memory alone.
The world is always recalling its stories. Nothing in us
fit for the abattoir. Caravaggio painted his face on Goliath’s.
The offending blade is hardly in the frame.

Ok, follow Campbell, follow the vapors to your basement.
Meet the monster and wear his pelt across your shoulders,
but look, lounging on that boulder, one skillet-sized paw
crossed over the other, halfway to sleep. She’s hunting motes
of dust in sunlight, tending to herself with a slow rough tongue.