Wrappers

You’re twelve and in love with the boy next door
only you don’t quite know it yet.
That tingle between your legs
is something you fumble for while your sister sleeps,
while you are awake and dreaming.
You play married, practice that first boy kiss
against your pillow, hide pennies under
your tongue to imagine his taste.

The next day you’re doing laps in the pool
and suddenly blood is everywhere.
You check the water for sharks.
You dead man float but no one comes
to save you. This is how you learn
you are a woman: a pool of blood,
underwear packed with toilet paper,
a grocery bag handed over without words,
filled with pads and belts, too many loose ends.

You grow into this, the best you know how.
Follow package instructions, listen in the halls,
peel tampons like popsicles,
meet a proper boy who peels you like a popsicle,
makes you bleed on his gold shag rug.
You think about buying protection, being protected,
being exposed like a grifter.

Later, you’re in college, geography, discussing faults
and shields, so you tell the next guy over you think
you are pregnant. You are telling the wrong man,
he is not the one who should help you,
he is as close as you will get. Your friends take you
for a drive so you can cramp and bleed again.

After this, the blood never stops flowing.
You’ve seen bad guys on Starsky and Hutch
die from less of a loss and here you are,
day after day,
chucking off soaked undies in the bathroom at the mall.
This is no cycle, this is two straight lines
off the horizon, this is the community blood bank,
this is thirty years of looking between your legs
and you too dumb to move.

You will bleed through two weddings, one divorce,
twelve intrauterine inseminations,
twenty-five pregnant friends,
half a dozen bloated tirades on the way to the movies,
the gas station, through the lipstick aisle at Sears,
a thousand reasons to reject science or god or both
until you’re done,
done in,
chewed up like a piece of sugarless gum,
bled out like an old brake line,
scooped out like a pumpkin,
all your insides dumped, bagged, tied with a twist,
taken to the curb,
your outside shell washed clean
and grinning.

They didn’t tell me where the funeral was so I know it’s everywhere,

spilling over edges with its overwhelming hunger while I brew tea

the Russian way my mother taught me because strength necessitates

dilution. There is always tea and there are always lemons; consistency

is a little gift. “Did you know gift is the German word for poison?”

speaks a voice flush with anecdotes like some bloodfed mosquito

high on insulin (or maybe nostalgia). “Beware the standing guest”

I say, or think, or whatever –– talking to yourself is a dish best served

cold, and anecdotes are a fish without a schoolmate, and I’m waiting

for my own blue lips because it’s me who was the goth all these years,

wasn’t it? Wasn’t I the one dropping the knife at the dinner table and

saying come and come and come until tears ran dirty streets through my

various eyeshadows: sad little tombstones for my superstitions, carrying

sense out to sea? Whatever. They didn’t tell me where the funeral was

so I filled a ripped bag with knives, left their sharp trail as breadcrumbs.

I’ll be waiting here for your ghost, or for a regeneration of myself

which will not recognize him.

Then Became

        for Sylvain

© Cynthia Hogue, 2014. Originally published in TAB: a journal of poetry and poetics (2014). Used with permission.

Stepmother en Filipinas, ca. 1948

I.
Long before the clop-clopping of hooves
echo from the sun-baked road,
and the calesa drops off its passenger
and her groom, there will have been
a thousand chores completed.

The bride will arrive at her new home
and regally ascend to her forerunner’s
legacy on narra steps and floors
polished to ebony shine, mirroring
her long virginal skirt like lover’s
eyes lurid with desire.

And the dining table will not betray
one speck of dust—she could lick off
her dinner straight from its top.
And her dinner will be served
by an army of young servants,
sneaking peeks for signs
of approval or—Dios mio!—
displeasure, as they learn
to address her, Ima—
mother.

II.
Typhoid had robbed them of their blood
mother during the war that taught them
their sculptor father was useless
when art served no purpose but vain hope,
and beauty only attracted unwanted attention,
and it was more important to learn how
to bow low to the Hapon and say Hai!
like you meant it, unless you craved
a lusty beating, and how to carve
out a living selling poor man’s meals
from the bodega of their house.

Everyone says how lucky they were
for a young lady to want to marry
a man with seven children already.

III.
The fourteen-year old eldest daughter resents
the woman not much older than she
usurping her place as mistress of the house,
can’t think of what more a man could want
beyond a brood of obedient children
catering to his needs. Doesn’t grasp this
until that night when he orders everyone
to bed early, and the house—
thought to be dead all that time,
rises and sleepwalks.

The daughter knows,
for she heard it straight from the loose lips
of the heaving and groaning floors.