When I became a single woman, the men swarmed all around me. It seemed the more I was, the more they multiplied with their prophecies, and their payments, and their wagging, tepid tongues. Their attention, it angered me. How they told me not to worry. How they told me they’d be back. The worst ones I let do whatever they want. My body—a glass or liquid— submitting to their heat. (I have loved three men in my life. I have held one up to the light.)
Shot in the dark, out like an arrow: I pull my underwear down, while standing up. I keep my mouth shut, except when you’re in it. Shock of skin like an animal going frantic, fast. I fuck with you, and love shakes its salt lick into me. Eyes level, hackles raised. Pink on the inside, pink on the inside, tell me I’m not someone’s daughter you’d praise.
October light pierces possibility right out of the air. Tree trunks unmoved as a haunting. Birds darken with worry in a crushing autumn wind, and a barge cleaves the Mississippi, smooth as repetition with no difference. Everything hushes before the worst of it— how a doctor tells you to relax before administering pain. Keep my heart, you can’t cure it. Tonight, I’ll lie down with the ear of another. At every hour the river wheels and eddies. Promise me the song always comes back.
and when you told me you loved your wife it didn’t matter and when you sent for me in another state it didn’t matter and when you told me to leave the next morning it didn’t matter and when you said you wouldn’t touch me (and you touched me) it didn’t matter and when I wept, swore, had other men (again and again) it didn’t matter and when I finally made haste like a heroine it didn’t matter I did it all (and then some) to speak achingly and to live.
This morning I look at the wedding ring I never wore, the lemons limning the wooden bowl, furred white from age and heat. There is snow again. There is morning again. There is the predictable deer print tracking the perimeter around the house. Last year I let a love go, then lost another. What this is it is, no matter where you edge. There is sun again. There is luck again. Relief across a blameless ground, a bright light, no longer begging.
Hannah Bonner’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Asheville Poetry Review, Pigeon Pages, Rattle, Schlag, So to Speak, The Hopkins Review, The North Carolina Literary Review, The Pinch Journal, The Vassar Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, TriQuarterly, and Two Peach. She is a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Iowa.
Still images from Drunken Angel (醉いどれ天使, Yoidore Tenshi), a 1948 film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It is notable for being the first of sixteen film collaborations between director Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune.
