I go to the museum and sit before Robert Motherwell’s
Elegy to the Spanish Republic with three black holes in my head.
One for the way I hated the poet when he called me stupid.
Another black hole because I felt like a child, carsick
and chicken. I don’t care what day it is, he said on my birthday.
Was he an aperture, opening inside me?
Or was he a bullet I must dodge for the rest of my life.
At the Cash America Pawn, I waited in line, the ring box
white as ivory, a severed tusk singeing a hole through my hand.
One more black hole, there, in the middle. The question
I asked in my head for a year: How can he think
he owns other people? Him, in the dark, calling my body
his. My breasts, my hair, my hips. I shout leave
into Motherwell’s circles. I know I can’t help it, the ring
in its strange case, cold as a head with no body.
