The first breaking story I remember
hearing as a child, wide-eyed between my parents
on the couch as we ate ice cream, watching
the six o’clock news. I’d never seen one before,
except in a quick flash, a boy my mom tutored
in his closet laughing though I didn’t understand
why it was a big deal. I knew boys had one
and I hated boys. How I imagined it,
there was no blood. Just a pale limp organ
like a peeled banana snapped softly in half.
I pictured her tossing it out the window
into a dark pile of twigs and driving off.
Why she did it was unimportant to me.
I’d seen my mom get angry
at my dad and believed women
were always right. It was the ’90s. Wives
were a punchline. Their thighs
were too fat and they were too old
for their belching husbands whose stomachs peeked
out from their Buffalo-sauce-stained tees:
Take my wife. It would have been a fair conclusion
to any family sitcom, honestly: the husband
in the den, remote in hand, snoring gently,
or at the kitchen table with his other husband-friends
gawking at the sixteen-year-old nanny over poker chips,
none of them even good at poker—then wife
enters with butcher knife. The news anchors
never explained how he hurt her. Entered her
body in ways she could barely whisper to the court.
Never said he promised to kill her.
The penis was the story as, I would soon learn,
it always is. But still I liked how it made men,
even the grown-up ones on TV, squirm
like little boys with mothers scrubbing
the backs of their necks for Sunday, scrubbing
harder than they needed to, like it was more
than dirt their rough cloths sought.
Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Cortland Review, The Southampton Review, Memoir Mixtapes, Glass (Poets Resist), Superstition Review, New South, Collective Unrest, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University.