METTA
We saw the unloveliness of our suffering, my insistence
on control, we were opponents in desire; your molten eyes spat
as I yanked your hair, blood rose in our throats to splatter the stairs.
Heat from our bodies steamed walls between us.
I’d given you birth. Nurses held my legs together
while the doctor took off his coat. It wasn’t fair how
we hurt each other. You refused to cry; your eyes shut
tight in a tiny crib I could not enter.
Violence at birth. Violence later. Your screaming insults
seared ceilings, slammed like vomit onto floors.
Unhappiness infected our house, throbbing like a migraine,
as I glimpsed edges of your pain through thick smoke
seeping from under your door, swept sweet ashes from the fires
you lit, dumped them across my heart. You stole my things!
“Where’s my green top? Where’s my ring?” You flung your self
across my table, and still, I didn’t see. I thought I was real.
You invaded my closet to stick pins in my pride. Ruined!
Ruined dresses. Ruined nails. Ruined things. Ruined me in the rubble.
I stole cannabis budding beneath your study lamp while you left
me flat against my unskilled habits and inconsequentials.
You abandoned closing arguments, cast aside bargaining chips,
emerged from my self-made shambles better than me
and that wasn’t fair, but one day you’ll have a daughter, and you’ll see
how I wanted to flee, and you had the courage to run first.
In parting, I suffered. No escape. But you sent me a peacock feather,
the suchness of which rested in my hand like forgiveness or lovingkindness,
revealing at once our oneness—you, me, us—and l let go of my addictions,
delusions, not owning or being owned; and my heart grew full.
MaryAnn Easley is an author and educator with a dozen young adult novels, audio books, and nonfiction to her credit. She teaches fiction, memoir, journaling, and poetry to older adults for the city of Laguna Niguel and tutors foreign students at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, California.
