toth42
Cowboy
Ble Medlem: 04 Nov 2003
Innlegg: 4849
Bosted: Det blide sørland
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 Fokus i kriminalsaker
I feel the motion of the car before I open my eyes.
The air is blue-black, brown-black, black-black.
Smell of gas, oil, animals.
I'm in the trunk.
My wrists and ankles tied.
Tape over my mouth
it almost covers my nose
but I can breathe barely.
I must have been here for hours,
everything's stiff and my head throbs
like someone's drumming on china.
The car stops.
He turns off the motor -- but there are no traffic sounds.
No people sounds. No wind. What place has no wind?
I turn my head towards the sounds
like people watch radios when something terrible happens.
My palms are sweating. Where am I?
The trunk squeaks as he lifts it up and the sun blinds me.
He almost looks like a faceless Jesus surrounded by light.
He pulls me out of the trunk and bangs my head against the door.
I try to cry out, but it comes like a hum.
He drags me, half-standing, along a dirt road into a house.
I can't see any other houses and it looks like a farm.
The screen door bangs behind me and I feel a deep, deep pressure inside.
All the rules have changed here.
I'm dragged down a hall like a bag and I look for a phone, other doors.
Nothing but bare floors and brown boxes in small rooms.
He pulls me into the bathroom
and I almost crack my head as he pushes me onto the floor.
Tilts his head to the side and gazes at me
as if I was a pet then walks out.
I'm lying there for a long time, trying to get the tape off of me.
My eyes are tearing. I don't make a sound.
I can't get up and I keep rolling from side to side, trying not to make noise.
I've got to get him to talk to me.
If I can get this thing off my face I can talk to him.
I'll tell him my name.
Have you killed other women in here?
I'm thinking you've got hundreds of them nailed down,
hung on walls, hanging from ceiling fans
swinging dead in summer wind.
Why did you pick me?
If I had stayed to finish at the library
I would have been there twenty minutes longer
maybe I'd have been OK.
Would have rushed into the house, books piled up in my arms like a baby,
and blurted explanations why I was sorry.
So sorry I'm late everyone.
Would you have waited for me anyway?
Would you have picked another woman?
Would I have read about her in the paper and said
oh my god, I was there that night...
and called all my friends in a panic.
Telling them then how much I loved them
as if I'd never have the chance again.
I wonder what everyone is doing now. Putting up signs.
Showing my picture on the evening news. Calling old friends.
Maybe I'm not even considered missing yet.
The family will fall apart and my parents will go crazy. Slowly.
My brother will be so quiet at the funeral and insist the casket be closed.
(I never even told anyone what kind of funeral I wanted when I died.)
Maybe years from now they'll find my skeleton
on the floor here and they'll have to use dental records to identify me.
My family will say "At least we know now.
We always hoped she was alive somewhere.
We just hope she's in peace."
When I sleep my dreams are crazy -- I'm flying over fields.
I don't think I sleep for more than twenty minutes and when I wake up,
it feels like I'm under a heavy blanket. I'm still here.
As I wake up I hear a dog barking in the distance
and I think I'm in my parents' house in South Carolina.
When I open my eyes, there's a shotgun pressed between them.
I'll never get married.
I'll never have kids.
I'll never go to Europe.
I'll never learn to play piano.
I'll never write a book.
The last thing I hear is a click.
-Nicole Blackman - Victim
Fra intervju med Blackman:
Victim . . . Victim is extremely raw and visual. Like all of your pieces it's the imagery that grabs the reader. How did Victim come about?
"Victim" is different from all the other pieces and I'm more careful with it than any other. I was watching the news one evening and they showed a missing woman's face on the TV screen and I just knew she was already dead. I don't know how, but I did. A few days or weeks later, when I was working on another poem on the computer late at night, I heard a voice telling me something very clearly, so I typed it in and tried to get back to my work. She kept pulling at me and told me the story quite distinctly, as if I was taking dictation, and I had no idea how it was going to end. The phone rang suddenly and it was a friend inviting me out but I was in such a daze that I mumbled I couldn't go and tried to get back to the story but the woman in the story stopped talking to me and I couldn't feel her presence again. I left the piece half-finished and switched it off for the night. When I went back to it a week later, I re-read the piece and when I got to the interrupted part, I felt her near me again as if she said "We need to finish." And we did. When we got to the very end, I was nearly in tears and when she told me the end I just sat there for an hour or so, in shock. She never spoke to me again.
I don't pretend to understand that process, but I feel very protective of that piece and when people ask me for permission to do "the killer's response," I'm horrified.
America makes murderers into anti-heroes and I think "Victim" focuses our attention on the women who are usually simply known by how they died ("cheerleader in phone booth," "waitress at truck stop," etc). We learn everything about how these men were raised, what they liked to eat, the music they listened to, etc etc, in what we claim is our interest in "studying" their symptoms and motivations so we can prevent it in the future, but really we're just looking for traits so we can identify with them ("Do I have it in me to be a murderer? Does anyone I know?") or feel smug in the knowledge that we're superior to them morally, but it's just voyeurism wearing a policeman's hat.
People are sickly fascinated by how her body was found, what she was wearing, how he disposed of the body. Anyone I ask can tell me a list of serial killers' names but I bet you can't name a single woman they killed or tell me what she was studying in school or what the names of her pets were. If I was given that poem for a reason, I plan to take good care of it and make sure she's not further exploited..
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