Goodbye, John
Not the Jesus to my child——
you were the child, I the second coming——
or first, or last, depending whether we count
the wife who resented your paintings,
the mother who called you golden, or neither,
since I alone stayed. No number of melted-down
wedding bands could heal your cracks——
you were, to hold another, too broken. But when you
drowned our bond in the pond where I caught a frog
to delight you in our last hour, it was——despite
the end you intended——baptismal, revision
of a Kentucky minster’s botched salvation in fishing waders,
extolling my virgin promise as he dunked me,
an expurgation failed because I needed none; because
he’d blessed not my soul, but the congregants’ delectation
of the slicked-wet T-shirt on my breastless chest.
I ate nothing for weeks after you lured me to that garden
from which I drove home, shaking like death. But I lived.
LIVED because I was more holy
than he/who pushed me under——
you always knew this.
When the “Hot Viking Hayseed” I Just Met on Tinder Says He Wants to Lick Every Inch of Me
I start to cry,
remembering the time I did that for you once, starting at the top of your knobby-naked scalp—bald on top and shaved on the sides——circling circling, swabbing the knotty whorls of each ear, mopping your fragrant-soft neck, flicking and licking across your collar and shoulderbones, each arm muscle wrapping, each palm and each finger, lapping your copper-furred pectorals and abdominals, swirling up scent from the frankincense pot of your naval, a fluttering wet butterfly tongue on your inner thighs down to your calves down to each long, weed-haired-shell-nailed toe. And then I made you turn over, and did your back. Throughout, your eyelids tremulously closed, window tree light wind-chiming your winter shrub eyebrows and gold-red lashes. You were a child inside yourself, bathed clean of sorrow by the warm wet cloth of my tongue.
And then you opened your eyes,
and saw
nothing.
(Still) Trying to Teach My (Soon-to-Be-Ex-) Husband about Two-Way Streets
You text me
Because you’ve lost your car keys
And expect help
Though I’m four geographical
And at least a few mental states
Away, not having loved you
Now for three years.
It was always my fault
When you erred, always
My problem——really everyone’s
Problem but yours.
How angry you got that time
I drove the wrong way up a one-way——
You brought me to tears——
You only ever brought me
To tears. Just as I somehow didn’t see
The sharp, white-on-black arrow
In time, I didn’t see your love
Was one-way, too, until I’d driven it
Ten years and then some,
Focused on the way I thought
Was the way back
To pleasing you, for I knew
No other path, lost
The distinction in a rain-smear
Of worn-out wiper blades between
Joy and validation——but you
In your black-and-white thoughts
Brooked no uncertainty——
You hated when I tried to show
You both sides——there was only
Ever one side in your
Mind, and that was yours.
I text you
About reciprocating
When people are generous
With their time and money
Or eventually, they’ll stop, and you
Text back that you know
You know, and I wonder if
You could finally
Be changing, having assessed
The last two decades’ losses:
High school friends, gone;
College friends, gone——because they paid
For dinners, and you didn’t; because they
Picked you up at night when your car
Broke down, helped you
Move, wrote recommendations, and your idea
Of reciprocation was to just say “Thanks,”
And go on asking for hand-outs—more, more.
Your kindest friend of all, gone——
That Dutch guy from grad school
Who flew to Turkey for our wedding, danced
With your sister, hosted us
In his home in Leiden for a week——I remember
You snarled at me, in earshot of
His peaceful family, for spending
Our money (your money) to replace
Food we’d eaten from their fridge.
I don’t think it’s hubris to say that I——
Life partner, your children’s mother——
Was the greatest thing you lost
On your one-way journey.
And how you lost me
Was that I finally threw myself
From a moving vehicle
That was never going to take me anywhere
I hadn’t been, or anywhere good.
Synecdoche, or How You Loved Without Loving Me
Division was key: never all the woman at once; one day only my sex, only my poems the next. For weeks, you’d fixate on my lips, my voice, my word choice, look past my wit and thighs, my aphorisms and my eyes. You squirreled my erotic whispers in your headboard, my side-lit profile in your sink, pinned my laughter to the lapel of the dark purple suit in which you felt so fine-plumed and shiny, out in the world, wearing my joy as bait for other treasures. You tucked my ears and toes in your flowerbed, and left my kisses to shower pink blossoms upon your days——an ambient ecstasy, from which not one petal was dear to you. And in your oven, you stashed my ass, just warm enough that I wouldn’t warm it elsewhere. Must’ve been nice, enjoying me thus partitioned, bones and heart and cunt laid out, charming and impersonal as all the other trinkets with which you, ravenlike, festooned your private nest——you could lose any one, and still have the rest. To love all of me, in overwhelming totality, required more light than your trustless, guttering soul could cast from the pitfalled passage down which you hid, gazing at me——not so much with love as with curiosity——through a crack in a well-sealed door.
Francesca Leader has poetry published or forthcoming in One Art, Stone Circle, Abyss & Apex, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Her favorite revenge story is Kill Bill, the name of her villainous secret identity is Mortadella the Malicious Melusine, and her favorite historical disagreement——originating in ancient Japan——concerns whether Spring or Autumn is the more poetic season.
