Poetry By Jennifer Badot

Sean Benham CC




How Did Help Come?

I was wrapped in a towel, my mother having just given me a vinegar
douche in the bathtub and having done so with rage and roughness 

what truck stop had the cops returned me from, with cells of men
sloughed off inside me? The douche done, my mother left me 

sitting on the edge of my bed, thirteen, still unclean. Help came then
as the word itself making itself, another kind of bird inside me, 

a plea coming through my mouth somebody please help me, and soon
help came in the form of Tim who refused the sex I offered him.

He insisted on knowing me. His mother taught me embroidery.
In an oval frame I chain-and-daisy-stitched a blue flower. Or was it a fountain?

All the flowers are forms of water, Merwin says, and all the cigarettes 
I smoked were forms of loneliness. My surprise when help came again

looking for a light: Theresa outside the brick school asking
for a match. She was someone I wanted to know, she lived in a green

bungalow a few houses down from the bay. From that day,
what can I say, I was less lonely, her mother's kitchen bursting 

garlic, Friday night dancing drunk on salty linoleum, sleepless
with amphetamines o my sister … my heart waketh. Then my eyes 

saw when I was seventeen, out west, Seattle, a Swinomish man,
beaten into a police car, he was practically dead, so I drank red 

wine on an empty stomach on a boat that never left the dock
with a sailor whose tongue gouged out my dignity. This was the day 

John Lennon was shot, and the sky was a saucepan where I stirred
my scary thoughts. That December night in the liquor store parking lot

I stood under a string of colored lights and asked myself, but what are they
like? and my answer, like tiddlywinks and stars came to me as a revelation. 

​



Jennifer Badot (she/her) is the author of A Violet, A Jennifer (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022). A Pushcart Prize nominee, Badot’s poems and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, Studia Mystica, the Lily Poetry Review, Nixes Mate, the Poetry is Bread Anthology, the Big Brutal Act Anthology (forthcoming Fall 2026) and elsewhere in the glorious vastness. 


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