So he was not a god; so you slept tightly and still sweet; so all the ribbons came unfastened from your wall, descending to the rug like serpents freed; so your jewelry left green crowns around your fingers, wrists, and neck; so you did not come home that night or the next; so I am a married man, he said, pulling off the ring; so he filled the bathtub with hot water and threw in his divorce papers; so you stewed in pulp and ink; so he took you to the fair on the night of the first blackout, the lights and noise sucked suddenly into the fields, the carousel you rode gone lame and yet you were not scared, disaster a feeling as familiar as his lips across your neck; so when his hands pulled you from the horse’s back you did not scream; so this was what was meant by love; so a savior could be sinister; so a girl could be anything but good; so you slipped through the gap between the bleachers, joining half-eaten ice creams and used condoms and newly won stuffed toys, all things once loved and now forgotten; so you never were retrieved; so he looked for you in the wrong places because he did not know what to seek, could not describe your face to the police except to carve it from the negative of his own cheek; so when they asked where you were from he raised his shirt to show the scar across the bottom of his missing rib; so on the morning you meant to leave him you found pause before deer grazing in the lawn, their limbs lost to the fog, your eyes wide in the headlights, the crunch of metal, someone screaming at the wheel, his fingers wrapped inside and around your mouth, and you realized it belonged to your own voice, belonged to his own hands, to pull the noise from you and silence it.