This Is the Game
(after Dean Young’s “Romanticism 101”)
Then we build a house/hospital/schoolroom.
Then you’re the husband/doctor/teacher.
Then I’m the wife/nurse/secretary.
Then there are children——three girls for me
and two boys for you——to fill up all the space.
Then I stay home and cook dinner and iron
things flat and sew dresses for the girls
and walk the dog in the field behind the house.
(If I had to grow either sunflowers or carrots,
I’d choose carrots. Because you can’t survive
on beauty.) Then you come home from work
and I cook dinner and you eat the dinner
and you pat your tummy, say Yum…is there any more,
Mother? (There is always more. This is the trick
any good wife knows.)
Then you do not come home.
Then dinner burns in the oven.
Then I drink all the punch.
Then I drink all the punch every day.
Then one day you punch me in the jaw.
But I have a metal face and your fist goes CLANG!
and we eat dinner, me, the girls and the boys
and you are OUTSIDE the house.
Then you sleep with a girl at the office.
Her name is Antonia. She has long dark hair
and her own flat in Hemel Hempstead.
Then I go to the nut house.
Then I go to the halfway house.
Then I go to my mother’s house.
I’m not playing anymore.
I’m going in.
When to Sink, When to Swim
I can see the painted barge, see my father
at its gaudy helm, hear my sisters bickering
about boys and bunk beds. My mother strings
green beans into a plastic bowl. If this boat sinks,
she says, I’d save your father first. I was ten,
already too old to reimagine love, to grasp
how she might leave me drowning
because a good man is worth more
than three hard-birthed girls. On 501,
a dead deer stretches her sodden neck
towards the city and takes my first petition
for rebirth. Rain obliterates the road,
and driving is more prayer than progress.
Thing is, I never found a man worth pulling
from the water. No, that’s a lie. Truth be told
I leapt overboard each time the water got choppy,
left a coastline of good men swapping notes
and rowing for home. My sister asks me
for a three-word prayer.
I’m firm on Rebirth but not as myself.
Today at craft group, I was stuck
between two loud mothers, each one desperate
to save her kid from the slightest of harms.
They weren’t warned, one said. Suspension’s no joke.
The other hooks a red chain, says, I’m sorry.
We’ve talked your ear off. I shake my head.
No, no. You’re fine. See? I’m lying again.
I consider that prayer. Rebirth, for sure. Then Silence,
the kind that stretches like a gravel bed. And Stones.
May each be smooth, the size of a pocket.
Bunny Goodjohn’s poetry has appeared in a number of journals including One Art Poetry, Rust and Moth, and Sheila-Na-Gig. Her poetry collection Bone Song (Briery Creek Press) was published in 2015. Her favorite revenge story is Cinderella, not necessarily because she gets the prince but because her loyal dove kitchen staff peck out the eyes of the step sisters en route to the wedding. Sweet.
