A man told me I should split
my poem in two. Did I tell you how
off State Route Four,
in a small market grocery
near Knappton Road
and a baseball diamond,
I sold pork rinds
to customers streaming
to the Columbia, last season’s
fish guts still
smearing their pants. My shirt
buttoned all the way up,
how some like to imagine
the collar of a 19th-century
recluse. In my apron pocket,
blades for opening
stock boxes or a man’s
anything if defense felt
required. Was I ashamed
or careful. What
would you have had me
be. On my break, I took my bike
down Knappton, past the church
and the post office
to a street I won’t name,
hard bend and heavily-aldered angle
and another tangle Google maps
can’t photograph to a trailer
in the green overstory
where my boyfriend waited.
I knew what I was doing.
I wanted to.
We had fourteen minutes
if I was quick enough
after, sweaty from pedaling
so hard, to punch
back in. Sometimes I spent
too long chatting with Sandy
in the back room
so that I had to call
and say, maybe tomorrow. I liked
telling him
he had to wait. Then I scooped
as much as I wanted
from my half-gallon
of Neapolitan
in the deep freezer
and walked to the park,
sat down in the miniature
daisies, removed my shoes
and socks, and imagined
University. The birds
agreed. Or I changed
into running clothes and hit
out a good two miles
on the tarry expanse
toward the cemetery
and back, sure to check
for shadows. One day, Ricks,
my regular who dagger-eyed
the sportsmen like a dad,
who asked me
while I rang up his kale
and his yogurt what books
I liked best, and why,
and listened, who carried
his reusable bags in a box
on the back of his ten-speed, who,
flannel-clad and toolbelted
smelled like mint
and sawdust because all year
he’d been reworking the inside
of an old home for his girlfriend, describing
weekly to me each small act of carpentry
or electrical wiring, and to whom
as I scanned onions and arugula
I’d gasped softly about his plans for bees,
at last invited me to see the salvaged
ornamental railing
of his staircase, the mirrors
he’d found in thrift stores,
junk yards, the whole house an art
installation. I hadn’t known. I left
okay but after that Sandy bagged
his food. And now, what difference
exists. Is this where you want me
to confess a gun rack
still gets me bothered
even after reading Eisler, Butler,
after assisting 83 young women
file Title IX complaints? Does it matter
the first part of the poem in question
described death fantasies
and pigs, the second,
babies and Dickinson? Anyone
aware of Wollstonecraft
or Madonna would tell you
about the complex, and yes I got bored
with the boy by July; my body
over it by September. And not.
And does this belong
in a different poem:
the summer before,
a man on a Greyhound
disclosed (stem of
desclore, from Latin ‘to close’)
everything
I needed to know
between Omaha
and Spokane, and still,
after, for years I gave some
the benefit
of the doubt. I knew no one
would allow me that.
The sole clinic
near the township
staffed with someone’s
auntie. My best friend,
a Mormon, barely knew me.
And the poem in question
like an indie film, its subtitles cyclical,
contains a museum
of carcasses, a translation
of blood, a rude
provocation. Plus children.
But a man loves
a good couplet, especially
if he can watch, or set
a watch by it.
When I was thirteen,
a doctor told me my new breast
tissue was dense and I would need
to touch them frequently.
When my mother looked away,
he winked. Does this belong
in a different part. I’m tired.
You’re tired. Or were the seams
showing the last C-section
too clearly. Once a doctor
said the second was beautiful
because you could just remake
the same scar. You don’t even know
it happened twice,
he said, as if beauty
were my primary concern.
—
Maya Jewell Zeller (she/her) is the author of the forthcoming out takes/ glove box, selected by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize, as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011); as well as co-editor of the anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses From the Gloomy Northwest; and co-author of the textbook, Advanced Poetry: Pathways Into Poetic Lineage (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023). Maya’s prose appears in such places as Brevity, Gettysburg Review, Bellingham Review, and Booth Journal. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. An Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University and Affiliate Faculty for Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA, Maya is at work on a memoir called Raised by Ferns. Find her on Twitter @MayaJZeller.