Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

Danger

Antioch Columbia decided it didn’t give grades, a fact my father, who was paying for it, found unsettling. They also told me if I wanted a class on Women’s Lit I would have to teach it myself. I could handle that, what I couldn’t handle was my writing teacher’s outspoken preference for and devotion to Bruce Vill. He ‘writes like an angel,” she said. He was also a successful musician and disturbingly handsome. Horribly, I married him. But nothing shapes a warrior like suddenly finding herself in the wrong camp.

Your Sideways Smile

I heard you singing and remembered

All the things that you’ve forgotten.

I see you clearly like

A fish in a hailstone.

See your hands, so

Long for a man I always thought

And your upper lip too short

Like a lion’s in fact

You have an animal presence

Placing no trust in words

No trust in love

Acting after marriage like

We’d never met –

Creating islands undiscovered in

Worlds unreachable.

You were the joke

I didn’t get;

Blowing your smoke endlessly

Between us

Refusing to forget or

Forgive that essential fragility

Marking us human;

Fated as you were

Always to surrender

To the scornful cries of your

Invisible hecklers.