When you hit me,
Daddy, did you aim
for my thighs,
buttocks, back, belly?
Or did you strike out blindly,
carried on tsunami waves
that were born fathoms deep
and traveled far,
growing in fury
until they broke
on the designated shoreline
of my body?
Where your hand
or fist or belt
pounded into my very cells
that I was bad, bad, bad—
like in ancient times
on the morning after a wedding,
when the women would pound the sheets
against rocks to beat out the stains—
you pounded and you pounded
and then you hung me out to dry.
Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her early seventies who is finding her voice as a poet and writer of flash fiction and essays after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Multiplicity Magazine, Heimat Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Journal of Radical Wonder, The Bluebird Word, Passager, Persimmon Tree, Poetry Breakfast, Verse-Virtual, Witcraft, and elsewhere. She was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.