My English teacher put his fist to my chin as if to punchme in the face. He gave my jaw a nudge and said “you’re a doll,kid.” His name sounded like pervert but he taught me to love Hemingway, ran to keep his buttons closed, but still couldn’t know what it’s like to spin into a waterspout spitting psalms. Getting raped is a storm like this, like getting in a car accident on the way to school.

Getting raped, pulled over in a parking lot on the way to school sprays a shrapnel injury, body splintered while eating cheese. No punch or scar, just a pathetic blur pooled across his backseat. Rape made me a Dalí clock telling all the wrong times. Raggedy Ann doll, Peter Pan collar wilted like lily petals pried open. The nuns didn’t know, didn’t excuse my tardies. I closed my eyes while ladies shouted LOVE,

rich ladies in tennis skirts, lipstick blazing O mouths, O, LOVE O, while mine melted, a defeated sunset I had to reapply before school. Getting raped is a determined bird flopping half-winged in high grass, a know-it-all too afraid to raise her hand to ask, a gnawing appetite, a sucker punch spooling through your bones, a basement flood that claims your favorite doll. Waking up to a rape is uncovering a mutation in your DNA. No rape

kit to understand how everything untwists, recoils, reshapes. Rape comes back to get you. Big Bad knocking the doors of everyone you love, my husband’s ex-girlfriend. My husband. My every sister. Rape is dol-phin slaughter you lament before all-you-can-eat sushi. High school drop-out returned to drop a second time. Rape is a punch card Hallmark doesn’t make. There are no congratulations, no

get-well balloons, not for you whose name we aren’t supposed to know but goes viral all the same. I sat with my legs open while unraped ladies wiped sweat from pastel visors and went home to rum punch, and daytime TV. Getting raped is a blinding eclipse, it’s latex gloves, paperclips rubberbanded to a spitball slingshot in the school bully’s hand. Rape is a red mouth turning blue. They got all dolled

up to sweat. He kept doing it until I was dead weight he needed a dolly to lift and gave up. That didn’t stop the spectators. Don’t you know rape is a relationship and a sport? After rape, I came home to my Playskool dollhouse. Can you win rape? I was fourteen and a half, but after the rape I said fourteen. Rape is an apocalyptic antiwrinkle cream. After rape, love grows sticky. My skin spilled clear across the kitchen, tacky punch

I still can’t stop touching as if by stepping and restepping I can punch the spot away. Our whistles fail us. Where are you when we need you, love, because right now your friend or mine, me or you, is somewhere getting raped?

My mother and I are the same.Neither of us know simple wordsin our languages. Triangle, at all. Love,sound enough for someone to stay.

I don’t think I can be Americanif the place hasn’t given me name

yet? Besides becoming midnight for the process of naming,how are we alike, dad? What sameway were we beaten in place by America?

By time, dhuhr is the space opening, how to wordthe tired silence I have to listen to. To stay

in between our nations, we learn to Love

in someone else’s. I teach my dad loving,like the thing that smiles    nameanew and he swears my chest is empty, makes stayingritualistic, a chore to submit, to pray the way you’ve read about it, sameas your parents, you have to leave behind          wordsyou search for most. I can pray to God in America,

but not Allah. I wouldn’t know what words to say in American.

I can learn the Quran in between, but still think that lovingis a lie. And it works, I’m    here. I can wordmy body and outline it but still namemyself some        other. How I keep my samebrokenness and verse the claim that body stays

longer than its name disappears. And then, it staysto haunt you out of the between, America,

but where do you have to go? Sameissue. No place will ever want to Loveyou if no one claimed you first. Name?

Hajjar, Hajer, Hajar, Hajir, I think, the words

get confusing when only so many are left to say them. The wordssometimes        found from the silence — staythrough maghrib to say they really wanted your other name

the one you’d have if you weren’t American.

Like I am? Like this place had me and lovedme first when I came? And looks at me in the very same

way? Tell me to stay, and watch Americaflinch and    forget my name. How I            lovemy mom & Allah & even my dad, but the words? Never the same.