June Fourteenth
My children, if I may call them that,
that identical pair of beans, quick to arrive
then quick to die, quit my body
a year ago today. Not quit—I opted
for the D&C to say: they didn’t leave,
I did nothing to make them leave,
they were taken in my sleep.
The animal I became
conjured the animal I once was.
Fiend and brute and wretch. Back
to the wreck my husband had never met.
And that lie, hounding
since the first night I woke howling
next to him, startled, tentative:
this life doesn’t belong to you.
I was warned
about the nightmares. That in our first years,
my hells would hunt me in my sleep.
All my life, my mother locked
our knife block beneath the kitchen sink.
Did you know not all women hide
their knives from their husbands?
I married a man who owns a knife sharpener.
He slices everything soundlessly,
the way he learned in a class about knives.
I chop our produce with an air
of panic. Like a child
who found the murder weapon.
My husband once leapt out of a closet
in the dark. To make me laugh.
I wept. No one prepares you for the terrors
of living with a good man.
My mother still calls
to ask whether our doors are locked.
Maybe there is no cure for this. The way
the brain bends after trauma
and bends the world with it.
I never thought it was my fault.
I thought they didn’t want me.
I thought they, spineless, lungless, knew
I wasn’t fit to have them.
Even now, a baby cross-legged inside me,
I scan the day for traces of soot
sullying this honeyed life. I expect to pay
for what so many others assume
belongs to them. Who was it,
years ago, who told me--
afraid and wracked with undeserving--
to find a mirror
and look myself in the eyes?
that identical pair of beans, quick to arrive
then quick to die, quit my body
a year ago today. Not quit—I opted
for the D&C to say: they didn’t leave,
I did nothing to make them leave,
they were taken in my sleep.
The animal I became
conjured the animal I once was.
Fiend and brute and wretch. Back
to the wreck my husband had never met.
And that lie, hounding
since the first night I woke howling
next to him, startled, tentative:
this life doesn’t belong to you.
I was warned
about the nightmares. That in our first years,
my hells would hunt me in my sleep.
All my life, my mother locked
our knife block beneath the kitchen sink.
Did you know not all women hide
their knives from their husbands?
I married a man who owns a knife sharpener.
He slices everything soundlessly,
the way he learned in a class about knives.
I chop our produce with an air
of panic. Like a child
who found the murder weapon.
My husband once leapt out of a closet
in the dark. To make me laugh.
I wept. No one prepares you for the terrors
of living with a good man.
My mother still calls
to ask whether our doors are locked.
Maybe there is no cure for this. The way
the brain bends after trauma
and bends the world with it.
I never thought it was my fault.
I thought they didn’t want me.
I thought they, spineless, lungless, knew
I wasn’t fit to have them.
Even now, a baby cross-legged inside me,
I scan the day for traces of soot
sullying this honeyed life. I expect to pay
for what so many others assume
belongs to them. Who was it,
years ago, who told me--
afraid and wracked with undeserving--
to find a mirror
and look myself in the eyes?
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (forthcoming via Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including Ploughshares, The Nation, Pleiades, Waxwing, and the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, The Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.