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Who’s a Good Girl

(excerpt)

There are mountains in West Virginia that are wild and unclaimed, and my husband, Dante, sold all of his tech stocks and bought a plot of land on top of one of those mountains. A crew of men cleared a patch in his name, barely big enough to hide a house in between the trees, and I hadn’t heard a word about it until it had a foundation and the wooden frames of 4 bedrooms, one for me and Dante, one for our boy, Ted, one for our girl, Meg, and one for all of our overnight guests. Before we had time to discuss it, the house had a kitchen with quartz countertops and an island with a second sink. It had two ovens, one for the turkey and the other for the sweet potato casserole and the green beans with French fried onions, enough to feed a crowd, and it never occurred to him that no one would drive those curved roads and ascend that mountain to visit.

To say that I was angry was an understatement, but I shouldn’t have been surprised as his motto was, “It’s better to beg forgiveness than it is to ask permission.”

He paid his penance when I packed up the kids and moved back in with my widowed dad. The kids stayed in the refurbished basement rec room, and I slept in the bedroom I’d grown up in on the frilly canopy bed with cheap plastic finals, one of which fell off every time the door slammed shut too hard. The smell of my father’s bratwurst and tobacco, coupled with his grumpy attitude, untampered by my mother’s kindness and allowed to run wild after her death, drove me insane.

“Why is your hair like that?” he said to Ted, referring to the curls that fell below his earlobes, and Ted shrunk a little under his criticizing eye.

“You’re getting chunky,” he said to Meg, pinching her belly.

“Why doesn’t your husband want you?” he asked me while the kids were lying on the floor watching TV with the sound low, hearing every word.

Even in these modern times, unless your husband is a known rake or quick with a fist, it’s still mostly a woman’s fault when a marriage falls apart. In my case, I was simultaneously too emasculating and too needy. After three weeks under siege at my dad’s, I hit up a bar, ruining my 472 days of sobriety. It seems that I needed Dante to keep me square.

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Proud to be a Shriner’s Wife

(excerpt)

Gretchen’s been dating a 24-year-old professional boat racer from Brazil named Audato. She met him at the Kroger’s, picking among the tomatoes and iceberg. Iceberg for Christ’s sake. I could see if she were tiptoeing through the arugula or stroking suggestive spines of dragon fruit, but she met him shopping for the kind of bland, hot house salad my mother makes. Me? I’m the one eating the grapples, the cremini, the mesclun. If I weren’t so proud to be a Shriner’s wife, I’d wonder when my Brazilian would show.

Audato heads home in two weeks, and he’s taking Gretchen with him. She’s going to wait on the shore in a white pant suit and a blue scarf around her neck waving and smiling while he makes his way to the deck. I know this because I coached her out of the Macy’s and into Gabrielle’s downtown where she could get a properly made suit, and for more casual occasions, custom fitted jeans. The individualized tailoring only costs $50 more, and I wanted her to have them. She also tried on a stunning black bikini with little white dots and plump red cherries that laid out across her chest like a buffet. It lifted her breasts nicely, so nicely that it made Gretchen blush and hitch a minute or two before she agreed to let me buy it for her. We cut the tags and rolled the items neatly like cotton sushi and tucked them into two new, pink, hard-shelled luggage cases and set them beside her door three days before she was to leave.

When Audato came for Gretchen’s goodbye dinner, he brought a pitcher of Brazilian sangria, which turned out to be an ecstatic blend of $6 wine, fruit punch, Sprite, and maraschino cherries. He’d actually brought two pitchers, one in a sweating glass pitcher, the other in a Tupperware container as a backup. We had a marvelous time, talking and laughing, listening to Audato wax poetic in his thick Portuguese accent. Gretchen stayed at his side, giggling girlishly, preening her hair, and popping breath mints after every round of drinks. The laughing exfoliated my soul, and even my dear husband, Petey, laughed so wide that I could see his row of silver fillings in the back of his mouth.

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The Art of Drowning

(excerpt)

The baby bangs a glass ashtray on a glass table. I sit on the husband’s green couch and watch the news. A mother cat raced into a burning building seven times to bring out seven babies. It lost an eye, and the fire melted the mother’s face leaving a gaping, lopsided jaw. The mother cat’s whiskers are off. Fur singed. In my peripheral vision I notice the baby sucking on a copper penny.

The husband bursts through the front door. The walls startle, and plaster falls down in little ticks at his feet. He is carrying a small box. I move to the fireplace and arrange the shells that sit on our mantle.

“Hi,” the husband says.

I look past him towards the open door.

He picks up the copper penny baby.

“Hi, Little One,” he says. And then he frowns.

“What’s in your mouth?” he asks and fishes inside.

He finds the coin. The baby gags. And then coos. The baby moves quickly from gagging to cooing, from crying to laughing.

“Oh my God. A penny,” the husband says and rubs the wet coin on his pants.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“Christ, Emily. You have to be more careful.”

“My name is Elizabeth,” I say under my breath.

“What?” the husband says.

The husband drops the coin into his pocket. I put a shell to my ear and listen to the ocean waves trapped inside.

“I have to be more careful,” I say.

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Fatigue is the Light Missing from a Broken Bulb

Fatigue can arrive from avoidance of fatigue, and the only way to cut open the loop is to sharpen a knife with your front teeth. My right front tooth is fake — a replacement after a car accident — and my left front tooth lacks grit. By my age, I should have a notable achievement: a pile of thank you notes, the ability to identify notes on a piano. Instead, I have seeds from my stepmother stuffed into white envelopes that should have been planted in November, and now the ground is dry as a nervous throat, and the sun as red as open poppies. I’m staying inside, anyway, because the lizards are in the trees puffing their throats into brilliant pink displays, and I’m not prepared for the beauty contest. At best, my mating display is my goosebumps raising the sheets at night. I can sew a button, and I can make shrimp etouffee, but I can’t figure out how to tell my partner when I want sex. On vacation, the green parrots with the white bare skin around their eyes blush at each other to initiate whatever parrot sex is, and they’re propped in the trees like heavy puppets. I admire it. How romantic, to have someone control your difficult body. I have overindulged myself and there is no solution. I have prayed under the weight of the moon when there is no book describing a god I can humor. I have found that fatigue is the light missing from a broken bulb, and it’s too dangerous to pick up glass.

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Don’t Forget to Take Your Heart Medicine

Everything is possible. I am capable. We can seek help from a god we don’t believe exists. I am only bad at things because I believe I am bad at them. Etc. etc. etc. Just one time I’d like to open a self-help book and see a picture of the author at their absolute worst, and have them say, “I know what you’re thinking. What a before picture! But this was this morning.” Or perhaps it could have a photograph of an old, lonely man covered in liver spots, looking out a window as a recreational activity even though there’s a brick wall blocking any view, and the place beside the window is the coldest spot in the house, and it is winter in Chicago, and the man is nursing a hemorrhoid, and by nursing I simply mean he has a donut cushion, not anything crazy, and there’s no pictures on the wall, unless you count the note beside the bathroom mirror that says “don’t forget to take your heart medicine,” and somehow you can tell all of these from the photograph, and the caption simply says, “This is your future even if you try.”

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The Loneliest Blue is the Reflection of the Sky

God is the expectations of our ancestors, and I come from a family with low expectations. Upstairs, the carpet is half-removed and folded over, and my blood from two decades ago is a dry splash in the corner. My father slowly paces in the kitchen. He picks up crumbs I can’t see and rants about mice. I ask him if his eyes are blue or green, and he says, “I don’t pay attention to that shit.” I remember putting pink barrettes in his curly mullet as a child. I probably knew his irises then, in the way I know the sunlight while actively avoiding looking at the sun. The walls of his house are quiet. I chew my water. I eat with the mouth of an unanswered question. I want to tell him I once thought I’d catch bubbles of silence in my mouth until life ended. That I was once washed with grief until I was clean as used soap. He tells me to I need to go to church. But my friend and I both read the Bible and The God Delusion together, and we came out dumber with each book. Now I only read poetry, and who knows how that is affecting my brain. But more importantly, who knows the burning last spatter of feces from birds that come barreling out of the sky when a father doesn’t respond to “I love you”? I take a bath and it feels like cold wind. I listen to the clouds, and the edges crisp like the ends of cigarettes. I have found the edges of my father’s voice. They hang like frayed strings longing for ties. I’ve almost found a way to harness the stringy clouds. I’ve almost found a way to strangle the sky.

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American Summer

Summer is a tiring toy, a Barbie doll with one pretty outfit and no aspirations. My date gives me watermelon vodka, handing me the cup firmly like a mother pushes a thermometer into a sick child. It tastes of the pink underneath a flaked fingernail. The slick, green eyelids of the women in the streets are convincing me I’m bisexual, though I realize I’d quickly lose interest, because I’m the type to arrange a bouquet of flowers for you and resent you for taking them. I’m the type to drown in the bead of condensation on a leaf. My face is soaked in nervosity, a fleshy towel needing a wringing, and everyone is saying, “I’m here to party and I am worthy,” and I tell myself I want to be worthy of more important things, but really, it’s a defense mechanism. My date says, “you need to socialize,” and gives me more watermelon vodka. It’s a day for the sun to intensify the smell of urine at the base of a fire hydrant. It’s a day for mailing out our desires in black envelopes. We’d almost be having fun, if it weren’t for the incomprehensible stillness of our chests, our hearts drained like frightened squid.

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The New Yorker

I submitted some of my poems to The New Yorker. I must like pain. When I was a child, I would thread needles through tissue-thin layers of my skin and marvel at my minor injuries, my new little baggies of flesh that hung from my fingertips. Not much has changed, I see, as I stare at my rejection letters with a similar gross curiosity. I’m not thinking about it too-too much, I tell myself. I’m rubbing my fingers together over where they were once scarred from sewing needles that ate my body like metal termites. I suppose my skin went “back to normal,” but I have no clear memory of what that normal was and who knows if normal is ever inherently good anyway. I’m tired of trying to figure things like that out. We all once had fun with philosophy and then it cracked and shriveled, like a house plant without a window. I own a book on walking through these kinds of forests that don’t have paths. Forests as dark as the insides of our organs. It has something to do with a metaphorical trailblazing and I’m over it. I am struggling to turn its pages with my fingers; they are tapping on the armrest. I am impatiently waiting to receive my rejection from the New Yorker.

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Analogous

Raccoons can be landscapes, reared up on their hind legs
against the fence, body in cat burglar stance, ready for any

tricks the motion sensor attempts. Wrecked cars can be
landscapes—Christmas presents crumpled and torn

in the back seat. Who bought them? And for whom?
Where were they headed before taking this detour?

Who designed the wrapping paper to mimic falling
snow, candy canes? Mirrors can most certainly

be landscapes, reflect whatever comes before them, then
tuck whatever’s left down deep in memory’s silver pocket.

Wishes can become landscapes, once they are pulled
from the bone, all tinsel and prediction, whistle and grit,

entrusted with fixing on the horizon whatever appears
to be broken or undone. Turkey vultures, though,

are quintessential landscapes. They perch like tilted
weathervanes along the roof line, sample the wind

for that cadaverous scent that lifts these raptors by their
six-foot wingspans to soar on updrafts until they locate

what today’s buffet special will be. Then they land
like staggering sailors, hunker down, and begin to eat.

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My Grandmother Attends the Athens Quilt National, 1979

In her world, the fabric recovers what it once
clothed, garments stained or worn so thin
that she had to salvage the best with scissors,
then rock the treadle to piece corduroy to wool

to flannel in a starburst that, like a wood fire,
warms three times. Nothing frivolous, nothing
fancy, except for a burial quilt too bleak to abide
that she edged in lace and pearl buttons taken

from the baptismal dress. Under “Do Not Touch,”
she fingers a manatee’s taffeta fins, the tessellated cape
of a matador, and finally, a school of Escher fish

that shifts into a skein of geese as the pattern moves
from sea to sky. She finally says, “You know, they
did their best, but these quilts aren’t nothing but art.”

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