The man yells to us from the passenger side of the back seat of a small, compact car.       
     "Your mom is hot." Your mom. "Your" is the determiner. Implying possession. Possession belonging my eight-year-old boy, who is holding my hand. It's true: I am my son's mom. I am his.
     When my son was born, they put him to my chest right away and maybe he latched on, as they say, took in my Colostrum with a Capital C, my very own elixir made just for him, but I can't remember. What I do remember clear as a bell, clear as those tubes around me and the little mask they put over my face to give me oxygen and through me to give him oxygen until he was free of me, is how tiny and perfect and blue and then red my son was as he came out. I thought, This, This is You, You're here. My immediate and consuming love for him wasn't so much a feeling as a complete planetary shift.
     But that's all I remember, though I can fill in the rest from the photographs where I look puffy from the saline they gave me to counter the epidural. In the photographs, my husband is holding our son and his face is turned toward the baby, mine toward him and the baby, and though no pictures show this, my insides felt empty then. The nurses outside the frames are cleaning up blood and afterbirth and all those things I didn't notice coming out of me, because I was reconciling this tiny person with the body I had watched round underneath my t-shirt. I suspected my heart had come out along with my son, and my husband held it also in that little blanket covered in cartoon elephants, and suddenly his hands were too weak and too small.
     What I want to say is, it's true what the man in the car is yelling: I am my son's more than he is mine.

My son was born of my body, the body the man says is hot. So hot, in fact, the man wants to fuck it.
     It is hot; the weather, I mean. It is summer in Southwest Missouri, the Ozarks if we're being regional or poetic. Bugs reflect the sun like glitter twirling lazy in the sticky air; the cicadas are waiting to start their screaming. These are images I turn to when I describe the Ozarks in the summer: the fireflies blinking patient flirtation, the quiet lakes serene but full of winding snakes, their heads emerging like counterfeit turtles. Caves gaping like old men's toothless mouths, a steady 60 degrees in their cool insides while outside the heat remains suffocating and dependable.
     I did not grow up here. I grew up in Simi Valley, California. These are the images I turn to when I describe my childhood: Santa Ana winds, spicy eucalyptus trees, messy palms. Red ants, bougainvillea, avocado trees, dusty horse trails, browning lawns. The valley is (in)famous for the Rodney King trials, the Ronald Reagan Library, the Santa Susana nuclear disaster, Charles Manson's caves. My grandmother grew tomatoes there behind her trailer home, big beef tomatoes my cousin ate like apples while we all watched Little House on the Prairie.
     I visited Laura Ingalls Wilder's house once; there's a museum in Missouri. It was hot that day, too, it was hot in the valley where I grew up in California, it's hot there now, fires in the wind, ash falling like the snow we get sometimes in Missouri and never in the valley in California, ash like my grandmother under the rose bush now, heat like a blush of embarrassment, of anger, of fear when a man calls out to you and your son from a car.
     My son's father is from these streets, this state, this heat. It is because I was once his—my husband's wife—that I moved away from the eucalyptus trees and my grandmother. I am not his anymore, though; I am not my husband's, and he is not mine. When I refer to him now, I say (as above), "My son's father." My son's father is not here when the man yells from the car.
     It is so hot in this Missouri summer, there is a mirage effect happening in front of the car from which the man is yelling, "Your mom is hot; I want to fuck your mom." I am sweating as my son and I walk along the sidewalk to the pizza place—we are on the sidewalk when the man in the car yells to us—where we plan to eat and celebrate my son's third grade Back to School Night. My body is hot and hungry; my body is human and sensitive to marriage, birth, divorce, and humidity.
     Your mom is hot. In my son's classroom, there is a sign with a list of adjectives. "Hot" was not listed. The children had written short stories in preparation for Back to School Night activities; my son's story was his usual narrative default: a lonely animal finding a friend, maybe an unexpected friend, like a whale befriending a shark.
     Your mom is hot. A metaphor? No, there is no artistic mind at work here, making a comparison to deepen the meaning of "your mom," to "sound the depths" as Flannery O'Connor says a good metaphor should do. Build the storyworld, I tell my students. (Or am I their teacher, in the same way that I am my son's mother? A tricky thing, possession.)Your mom is hot. Tells us nothing more about the mom, nothing cultural, doesn't give a sense of interior life, simmering conflict.
     A more interesting line might be: your mom is lonely.

"Your mom is hot" is followed by the second complete sentence, which I argue is joined with a semi-colon, as the meanings build upon each other, relate: "I want to fuck your mom."
     The subject of the sentence is the man in the car, indicated by the first person pronoun, "I." If I were to make an educated guess, maybe the subject is a college student. His voice is young, his body leaning out of the window a bit, and I glimpse of a full head of hair. The object: your mom. Of the verb, which is want. Desire, necessary to any characterization. Yearning. We want/yearn for pizza. What does the man in the car want to do? He wants to fuck. Who/what does he want to fuck? My little boy's mom. Who is me.
     There is a poem called "Decorum" by Stephen Dunn, which is a poem about a poetry workshop in which the students are debating the difference between the phrases "make love" and "fuck." The workshop members wonder if since the couple in the poem are making love against a gymnasium wall, perhaps the word should be "fucking." One workshop member wonders if "fucking" is too harsh a word, another workshop member says this workshop member gives "fucking" a bad name; the poem ends with the poet herself confessing that the woman in the poem who is being made love to is in fact her—the poet—and that it did not feel like fucking, it felt like love there against the wall in that gymnasium, and to hell with all the other students.
     I don't think the man in the car means fuck in the sense the workshop poets want it to mean; this does not feel like love or fucking. There are other ways a woman can be fucked: fucked up, fucked over, fucked with. I like the poem "Decorum." In the end, the poem is less about language and fucking and love than it is about teaching—the teacher cannot tell the student poet which word to use. I teach this poem at the end of my own workshops to try say to the students, somehow, that in the end, their work belongs to them, that a workshop can only take us so far, that a workshop can fail us entirely, can fuck up a poem, fuck with a writer, that sometimes it's okay for a student to say to a workshop fuck you, it felt like love, I was there.
     The poem is about helplessness.
     My husband and I were married ten years. We had trouble with love and fucking. We had trouble with possession. He said, come listen to the cicadas, and I asked, where are the Santa Ana winds?
Your mom is lonely.

What did that man say, my son asks, but I know he knows. I hold his hand tighter, or maybe he holds my hand tighter; we hold each other's hands in the way that I am his and he is also mine. In the way that I grew him and he grew me. In the way that possession is another word for belonging.

In the pizza place, we play Hangman while we wait. Death by words. This is our game. He wants me to guess "airplane." I make him guess, "pepperoni." He makes me guess, "child." I make him guess, "school."
     I write lines for a four letter word.
     Love.
     Food.
     Boys.
     Help.
     Want.              
     Live.
     Poem.

Sometimes I worry if I am hot, if a man will want me, will think I'm hot, will want to fuck me. I am a 36-year old woman and a single mother; I am a teacher and a writer. I have stretchmarks on my breasts; they are white and shiny in certain lights, radiating out from my nipples like rivers on a map.  In dark moments in my marriage before it ended, I walked by strangers and wondered what it would be like to fuck them, to have them fuck me, but when I say fuck what I mean is love, because love is what I wanted: passion, attention, orgasm, care, concern, fingers tracing stretch marks as maps to places reformed when my body became a mother, when I became my son's.
     I understand the students in the poem "Decorum;" words matter. Words have power. Words stand in for experience when the experience has passed. To love or to fuck; words make memory.
     When the man yells from the car, he speaks threat and violence. He removes meaning like stripping wings off a butterfly. Death by words is a game I know how to play. He speaks threats not to me, but to my son, and in this the man is a coward and a fool. He is the worst kind of man, one who is not a poet but a thief of innocence and beauty. Hear the cicadas screaming, little man? They are screaming curses at you in a language only my son and I can understand. I want to reach into the man's mouth and take the words for my own, house them in safekeeping. I want to hold them in my hands and wrap them up with a blanket: mom, your, fuck, hot.
     I want to take the words from him and make them mine, and I did.

__

What a strange and disturbing game, Hangman. Gallows, a quick internet search tells me Hangman is sometimes called; its 19th century name is "Birds, Beasts, and Fishes." "Bird" and "Fish" are both four letter words. While we played on the back of the menu, waiting for our pizza, my hands were still shaking.  Every word my son had me guess felt like a tarot card being turned over. I felt myself dangling, created and destroyed one stick torso, arm, leg at a time. The word "fuck" sat between us like a third dinner guest. I started the essay the week of the incident and finished it over a year later, after the #metoo movement. I wanted to keep it short, an exercise in grammar, but the writing turned as I tried to take each word of the streetcall as a prompt: Mom, hot, fuck, your. When I typed the last line, it was like someone else had typed it. That's never happened to me before. Recommended additional reading: The Rumpus series ["Enough"].