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.
Alysse Aallyn 