“We live between the act of awakening
and the act of surrender.” ~O’Donohue
The soul hungers for beauty within boundaries—
for stars enclosed in a cosmos,
speckled wood butterflies in a wedge
of cedar-filtered sun,
and unions—
book-ended by tenderness,
not torture.
So it is, when Rachel, a work colleague,
takes me for tea,
spills her story which was my story—
half a decade later
with me no longer the ingénue,
my story started in beauty—
beauty unbounded
by kindness,
whose price,
like stinking irises in a musty vase,
was to succumb,
Rachel set my story within her own frame,
came a beggar
as if I’m a lower-cased Jesus,
laying on hands to cast out doubt.
Our phantom is a plagiarism of love.
Spiders, it is said, master disguise,
blending in to look like flowers.
Some dangle sticky strands of silk.
Those which appear to walk on water
merely manipulate surface tension.
Many eat their mate, even while mating.
This incubus of ours mimics the African spider,
the only animal known to select its prey
based on what the prey has eaten.
Like me, Rachel has eaten grief.
She has been gorging on it for years.
Big, sloppy slices of mommy’s rejection,
heaped, bowls of daddy’s abuse.
None of it tasting right—
we’d recognize that taste anywhere.
Our faces wet with want for it,
like loud-mouthed babes,
clamoring for more poisoned milk
until we are bloated, all the deceits
a cruel mismeasurement of our resplendent worth.
After losing her toddler,
six months later her husband,
Rachel is engorged with grief.
To anything eight-eyed she is a ripe, red,
bit of inconsequential meat.
I don’t want her here, soliciting my advice.
Doesn’t she know this flays me?
Leeched from deep, pain triggers time-bombs,
I’m off rooting memory garbage for scraps of shit,
photographs a woman with mettle would burn,
annihilation and transcendence
that at its best is forgery
lifted straight from True
Confessions
I devoured in grade school.
When a soul shatters, artifacts
are that soul’s scattered remnants,
a way to keep what shattered.
There never was a soul to what we loved,
nothing beyond dross and slag.
Like a hologram divided a thousand times
each scrap a complete image,
only it is not his face—
but us women
never knowing exactly who we are—
or what we want
until all that remains are ruins.
And Jesus, there it is,
I stumble upon April’s
Destiny, the blog
of a professional victim.
The woman before Rachael—
prior to, during me.
With a malignant optimism
that can only be born
of a childhood so harrowing
it strip-mines all sense of dignity.
Less than a year after I finally left him
she returns to gorge—
his endless humiliations,
infidelities,
boasting of her strength
which even we amateurs recognize
is misidentified endurance.
Flowers thrive in tropical climates.
Nonetheless,
in barren Arctic conditions
a small number
with the slightest amount of encouragement,
hang-on tenaciously
squeezing out nourishment where they can.
The first time around April hung
on marriage promises a decade out and a decade back.
Pimped and porned—
acclimated to masochism and martyrdom,
she fucked who she was told to fuck.
Even after we’d met and I told her to get lost,
she wasted her retirement funds
on Cruises and Rolexes.
She bought him a bass guitar—
I sat next to him in music theory.
Three children in tow, she moved forty miles to live closer—
I moved in.
I’m not saying she did anything wrong.
My own grasp on morality
was subjected to magical thinking,
like Fata Morgana’s mirages of safe harbors
and well-defined coastal lines,
where alternating warm and cold layers of air
distort light, color, and distance.
Early Arctic explorers recorded islands
or mountain ranges that did not exist,
going so far as to let them block their path.
We are creatures of habit.
Even our most carefully constructed lies
have seams.
We call it destiny,
call it love,
call it endurance—
but we were not chosen.
We chose
what we already knew how to survive.
Rachel will go back.
April already has.
And I—
I am not certain
I have left.
