Bundy
by Peter
Mladinic
An
infant he sucked my nipple as I lay
in
the hospital. Fifteen, single.
I
lived two years in Mrs. Eliot’s home,
then
I met and married Steve, Ted
came
home, and we, Steve and I
gave
him a younger brother and sister.
Our eldest,
handsome, affable,
grades
good enough for law school,
I
was proud, someday maybe for Ted
my
firstborn, politics. Today I sit
in
court with others, in Florida. Ted,
his
own defense lawyer, wears a suit,
a
bow tie. I slap prosecutor hard
across
the mouth, at least in my mind.
My
blood boils how he lies:
the
VW bug, the cast-crutch sympathy
seduce.
A hammer-rope rape kit,
jail
escapes, a twelve-year-old victim,
the
sorority rampage, bludgeoned
by
this subhuman savage. Sex
with
the dead, the victims’ mothers
families
in court, as I am, weeping, only
my
child is here, his own attorney.
Ted
worked a suicide hotline. A clerk
at a
law firm, nothing amiss. In jail
yesterday,
in a jailhouse jumpsuit,
he
leaned across a table and looked
in
my eyes. I didn’t do it, Mother.
Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives on a
Table, is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights
advocate, he lives in Hobbs, NM.
Bernice Holtzman’s
paintings and collages have
appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including
the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery
on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in
a basement, and she was well received.
