I
(from Ted Pelton)
The snow was a wildcat that night, unpredictable and bright. You sat in the passenger seat, one hand screwed to the handle for safety. You should have been driving, but you called yourself a feminist. After we crossed the border into Canada, you screamed at me—for all the wrongs I had wronged you—in all the years of years of our tattered relationship. I remained quiet, as I always did with you, passive and afraid. I wish I had abandoned you then, but it took many more years to do that.
Without you, I search for happiness and find it.
And I do not miss you, not one bit.
II
(from Jereme Dean)
Even his chest contributes in our talks, which are really arguments, which is really just him yelling. Quiet, I level my belly flat against the powerful forest of his tautological rage.
III
(from Ronaldo Wilson)
He’s like, Your heart is swollen thick as a pig hock, and I interpret to mean that I am dying. It’s a terrible condition. And he’s like, You’re a fucking liar, and my body wilts into a variety of soft cheeses, moist and rotten. He says, You’re a selfish bitch, and when he goes, I am left like crackers, broken crumbs because he broke me. It is not because he is gone: about that, I rejoice.
IV
(from Mike Young)
I adjust the knob to char what is already over.
V
(from Alexandra Chasin)
Overcommitted to white guilt, my ex-husband distributed my Otherness. I was his relief. But what he did not know was how I stereotyped and objectified and reduced his positionality too, how I techniqued his domination. My ex-husband always hated my sex toys: I still prefer masturbation.
VI
(with Dave Griffith)
From his mouth comes sound larger than rage, which I cannot afford to resist: our double economy: his wrath is not equal to my fear.
VII
(from Michael Kimball)
We, like miasma, curdled. You may have tried to acclimate yourself to my body temperature—its solicitous movement through and forward—but that only furthered my distress. I was always the calm against your tornadoes, funnels of monstrous despair; eating, eating.
In the quiet of early dusk, I revert to myself, distant from me, but I feel a torrent eclipse my body: anything is possible when you leave me, forever.