I Wish I Knew Your Name

Whenever I hear or read about Bystander Syndrome
(the tendency, when hearing a cry of distress
to assume that someone else is already helping)
I think of you, in your pitch-black
3 am apartment,
groggy or dazzled with adrenaline
picking up your touch-tone phone
3 digits and saying,
There's a woman screaming. No.
A girl, she'screaming bloody murder,
she's screaming movie screen ghosts,
knockdown death announcements,
but mostly she's screaming stop
stop stop.

Those screams register in my memory as empty silence,
blowing wind, but I remember their voices
snarling slurs in the dark, their blunt instruments
pummeling my face.
This is how parties can go wrong.
This is rohipnol
and abject teenagery.
I remember the spattered blood,
the gash and my black, black eyes.

You didn't roll over and try to ignore the noise.
Bless my terrified lungs.
Bless and surround in white light
any woman who as ever used her voice
to say stop stop stop.
But mostly, bless and thank you,
who didn't try to sleep through the wailing
who didn't bury his or herself
deeper in the blue blankets,
into the warm spoon of your spouse.

You called them.
They came.
I'm here
I'm here
I'm here.

This life,
lived with more-than-reasonable distrust,
space issues and excitability,
with groves of lilacs,
the drawings of children,
with time on the couch with my true love,
I dedicate to you.

When they creep up on me
unseen assailants in the present tense,
I wish I knew your name
so I could say it like a glamour,
like a benediction.