Corporal Punishment

by Sandee Gertz

A man once told me he dreamed I walked a panther on a leash
and I wonder if this means I am innately wild.

Or if I have tamed a wild thing.

As a child I was a rebel, mixing in Tupperware seven unknown
alcohols from my friend’s parents’ locked cabinet.

We’d found the key and toted our cocktails in gym bags and
drank
them over the sinks of the Ferndale High School Girls’ Room.

I was spanked twice for this.

Once at home and once in the principal’s office when given a
choice
between two weeks’ detention or the paddle.

I chose the hitting, the cracks heard in the halls at the hands
the Driver’s Ed Instructor who was also my Sunday School
teacher.

Each lick stung.

I didn’t cry, except today when a wasp is near or when catching
a burn from a pot or curling iron, I can still well up, remembering
his wrists.

Where is the rebel in me now, I wonder?
Is she walking a panther on a leash down the childhood streets of
Bedford?

Crossing against the light?

One half of her is still breaking into hotel swimming pools at
midnight,
hoping it’s not cliché; the other writes from her bed on a sunny
day.

When I dream, I do all the daring of my past.
Forgetting to register my car. Rebelling against trash day.

New adult ways of sinning.

I want to take the dirty things to the curb on my own schedule.
Create a new calendar of when things are due.

If I could, I would dream up a deed I could be punished for:
Something worth the sting.