Five Women Ending in a Flower
1. The Girl
Why I don’t get drunk anymore. Why I wear a wry
smile at the hardware shop. Why I pretend I’m
the cowboy in the country songs. Why I fell in love
with her. Why I wear sunscreen. Why I want you
to look at me naked and then I don’t. Why I like
to drive your truck. Why I sometimes want to be
the one penetrating you. Why I like you to trace
my scars. Why I’m delighted when you fail.
Why I want to make your name into a diminutive.
Why I only held the knife in my pocket
when he followed me home. Why I asked for
your middle name. Why I keep scotch in the house.
Why I cut all my hair off. Why I’m still afraid of you
despite your gentleness. Why I know what you mean
when you say sorry, sorry, sorry. Why I’m such a good
sport. Why I think everything you say is so
funny. Why I don’t answer when you ask if I’m
ok. Why I fake pleasure when I feel pain. Why I wore
your coat that day in the park. Why I don’t want
my dog to trust you. Is embarrassing. Is a swimming pool
at night and the sharks I see there. Is laughable. Is wince-
inducing. Is my mother’s frown over the phone. Is my
fingernails pressed into my fist. Is my jail cell behind
the velvet curtain. Is the welt our mouths leave.
Is the gutted building in my chest. Is two boys
necking in the park. Is trying not to want.
Is the bear who comes back for more poisoned
meat. Is knowing I’m a traitor. Is shame
like clarified butter growing cold. Is owning
what I’ve said. Is being mad at you instead
of myself. Because I can’t help it any more
than you can. Because it’s not that we haven’t talked,
but that there’s no way to. Because all my excuses
have shriveled on the vine, turned so far inward
you’d have to eat them to remember the scent inside,
to ever believe they’d given anything up to another.
2. The Older Woman
What difference do years make? We call them
months: May, December. We say love thwarts logic,
and the thwarting makes it stronger, makes it true.
I came home from college to find your tube-socked
feet propped at the end of my brother’s bed. You
were his same little friend from a few years before,
but grown out of your cartoon-covered pajamas, the fuzz
on your round cheeks fuzzier. I took long baths,
imagining you imagining me under the faucet’s
wet lip. You wanted things you’d never
had before and didn’t know how to ask. Instead,
snow you rolled into balls and stuffed down my shirt
like a child. I’m just the same as every man I’ve ever
known: I’m trying to make this romantic for you.
My high school English teacher who rubbed me out
like a spent cigarette that might set his ex-wife’s
bed on fire, whispering, baby, baby, you’re so hot.
But then we’d be the other way around,
where I’m the thing that’s fresh and young
and you’re the man who’s ripping all my petals off.
3. The Whore
Our bodies are born liars. The yoga
instructor would disagree, wants me to
relax into the bend, by which she means
put my ear behind my knee. The man
in front of me does it, opens his hips
like a celluloid Gumby and tilts his ear
to the floor. I want to say, Get over yourself!
Then, Get over here! Better yet, Get on
top of me! Take the not-candy sugar
of my body and stick it on your tongue.
Put your hands on my thighs and feel
my skin trying to cool itself, the heat
that sweat wicks to the surface as I
prepare my contorted offering.
But his body is a liar, too. It’s not
for me that he makes his back a cane-
stack of ribs. Desire doesn’t make us
belong to each other. As starved as I am,
it’s for someone else that he makes himself
vulnerable, flowering his ass toward the ceiling,
his hibiscus-hole opening into the pink
plushness of another man’s love canal.
4. The Femme
I’m afraid of the ghost inside, its hunger to be
free, the way it waits for me to die. It wants me
to be like the ghosts of deer shot by
orange-capped boys, to pick my careful way
for the last time. Still, tragedy doesn’t undo me:
loneliness, fear, even the weightlessness
of a body without a double. But the memory
of another woman’s breasts, a beauty easily
recognized because it was my own, turns
everything into a receipt for my pain:
volleyball moon, red-bellied plane. If she
were still here, she’d call me a traitor.
If I could, I’d tell her I’m just waiting
for someone to bring the car around. The truth
is that I want to transgress the halls of sex,
eat the filter on the cigarette. I have
a thousand unlit rooms between my legs:
light a match, I dare you. But why
would the dead—which is what I am to her—
care about the living, their reckless streets, their wild
parades? We ghosts have our own invisible days
to cultivate, our own stillborn loves to nurse into bloom.
5. The Wife
We’re carving pumpkins. Somewhere,
two long miles away, new whales
so young they carry a crease
like a letter unfolded
by the wind, travel the night-
blind coast. Is all flesh fashioned
in the dark? If you want me
to remember that the abandoned
work of love our parents left
behind like a half-built house
is why we put our hands on
each other, that all the many
failures which came before us
have only made us hungrier—
then do me a favor and leave
my body somewhere I can
find it again, in a field
of stickseed and cinquefoil
with our fellow pretty drifters
who, like us, won’t remember
where their children came from
or why they left them here.