long/ If I turn my phone sideways it looks like a jail cell/ a stream of numbers//Pocket prisons// If I swipe quickly they all blur together/ one long crying code like in The Matrix// I don’t recognize the numbers anymore/When I see an email on the list, I’m able to gauge the era/year/period in my life when the block occurred/ I see an old girlfriend’s email, /full name/ and thus every number following it must have been /D–’s friends/peers/family// anyone associated with that person. Blockings are grouped/It’s not enough to block //one// person/There’s a chain of relations/ I won’t feel free until I’m certain ////I//// can’t be reached /Each link cut //unreachable//
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Block people// I think of little Lego people// Block limbs and tummies/ Angular arms that can only rise & fall, a curl/ Holes in their feet so they can be planted on fire trucks or cars or wherever–they aren’t picky// Blocky/ It’s what we say when someone’s clothes go beyond the body’s limits & expanses//Charlie Brown used to call people “blockheads”/ Did he mean they were so dumb that there were blocks in their heads? Or that their brains, like bread, had hardened, possibly from exposure or disuse?// I used to think if your head was too square or blocky, it meant you were loved more by one parent than another. The uneven love made you jagged, geometric, with lots of sharp edges.
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In 2012 I was in an abusive relationship with a psychology grad student. I was nineteen, he was thirty. //When I didn’t respond to his messages. He started calling me from a friend’s number. ///////unknown caller/////// Then from a friend’s number. ///////unknown caller/////// Or he’d use a number from Google and spam me until it was safer/easier/more convenient to leave my phone off. ///////unknown caller/////// Sometimes he got a mutual to ask me why I wasn’t answering his calls/ or to ask me if I’d “gone crazy”/ And if I had?// What?/ Would he have brought over one of his textbooks? Or whipped out an icepick and pointed it at the slip of my eye. Even now, in 2023, whenever I see ///////unknown caller/////// I think it’s him. I think he’s found me. I block them all, every chance I can, thinking I can evade him a little longer.
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/ A family friend touched ///me//// and when I became an adult I blocked anyone who still talked with /visited/or called him. /Sometimes I think of time/blocks of it/how slowly it’d pass as it happened/how present it forced you to be/ how twenty-some years later it still feels recent. I can’t block my grandma/ she defends the family friend/good man/helpful she says/ she’s one of those women that always sides with men/ the family friend would block the exit when he’d see me/alone/small/scared.// Blocked with nowhere to ///////go///////
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To block can also mean to stop someone from hitting you.// In video games, the characters cross their arms and squat, bouncing in their stance a bit as they weave about the arena. Each time I block, I am stopping an attack. Parry/dodge/duck ////safe //// slide/juke/swerve/A force field so no one can force themselves into my space./In fighting games, I always block more than I strike. Sometimes, with the right button mash, a character can break a block. Palms flat and arms open, falling to the sides as if welcoming the attack. You quickly realize you can’t win any game by only blocking.
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Swaths of memory gone/ hidden/ blocked/ possibly gone. A therapist called it a mental block. “You would fall apart if you saw the memory in its totality.” My brain wants to protect me/It redacts all images of the family friend/his shaded brown eyes/his mustache/his widening smirk/ Figure in black. My bed. A hand on my knee///then nothing/// Where do blocked thoughts go?// The family friend was deported. No chopping block though/ My grandma says he stays with his mom in his childhood bedroom. A couple blocks away from my family’s house in Havana// A couple blocks from a school//
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The family “friend” had/has a stepdaughter/my play cousin. I wonder if he searched for single mothers, knowing they’d want his help and support and money and a father figure to their children. Perhaps my cousin’s mother went to bed smiling those first few months/years because he had even offered to give the girl his last name. No one in my family calls him a rapist/monster/manipulator–and I can’t help but wonder how many girls it takes to be universally condemned. Is one too little? Just a momentary lapse in judgment? What about when you add me? Still too low? Not enough of a pattern?
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In order to enter the gifted program in elementary school, we had to take a test with blocks. Navy squares. Arranged on the mahogany top. Make this shape and that. Am I dumb? Am I taking too long? Why can I only take this test once? Shouldn’t I be able to take this in Spanish? When I fail, I wonder if my future will be determined? People will decide what I am, and who I will be. Certain doors will open and others will be blocked by their decisions. /You’re in the dumb kid class/ I say to myself. You’ll have a bad life, kid
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//There are people that can only open wounds in us.// I block before anything can ever escalate. At first mistake. First intention. First gut feeling. /Never Again/ I try to find my cousin. Did she leave Florida? The U.S.?/ Has she blocked //me//? I wouldn’t blame her. I see her face sometimes, whenever I feel a bout of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, I see //her// telling me I have no right to feel good /that she can never feel good in her body / So then why should I? /So I block out the sensations: the urge to smile/ the swell in my abdomen/ the desire to follow the blush to its natural conclusion. I am a room without exits. Blocked.
~
///her///me///
