THE SPIRAL

Maryanne– touching her stomach. Her center. Where she feels I am the spiral. She has told me what I already know. I am the nucleus. I am the one she wants to fly to at night when I tell her I am falling apart. When I tell her I am sweating in the dark. When I tell her I am wearing the wrong bra. When I tell her I am coughing up bats. When I tell her I am temporizing. She is in the blue-black looking at flights. Our parents told us our Savior wanted marriage to be a convention. They told us we needed a Savior like salt. They told us no. Maryanne said she was sitting in the church pew thinking of my body.  My archipelagos. She told me she loved me. All around us nets hang. She thinks all around the problem, but not into the center of it. She wanted to know how to move, and what she learned was that whales have adaptive hunting behaviors to survive extinction. Stay into loving her husband. His safety. His giant maleness. His solid liver. I catch myself feeling like melted butter thinking about her touch, feeling all soft and dripping and impossible. 

She impossibles all wrong. 

I AM MARYANNE

I love her when I am supposed to love him. I relish the secrecy at first, a hidden chocolate chip cookie I sneak bites of. But then the cookie is eaten up and gone. My emptiness is so vast that I become possessed as if I am a drone. I make so many cookies so fast. My joints heat up and flake at the edges, but I can’t stop. I take the cookies to her and I put one on her mouth and two on her breasts and she eats the one from her lips, and I bend down and gently, so lightly, lick a chocolate petal from her chest. I know I will be unrecognizable to the man I married. I know I will be kindling to the others instead of a straight-grown, prepossessing thing. She covers me with her arms. Her body. Her deep crystal calm. 

She whispers, “Stop moving. Let’s go swimming. I’ll drive to Lethe.”