The Bad Wife Handbook. Rachel Zucker
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at evening.
To wish the best for someone
I love might mean leaving
or leaving him alone. To wish for
him. Wish for him to—
It looks like rain means it’s not raining.
It Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon
I forgot to think of him today.
Made of carbon, oxygen, calcium: you, him, I, stars.
When a Mars-like body and Earth collided
within hours was a protoplanet named Moon
and a planet moved away.
For days
I forget.
Mantle, core, ocean, air, I
am made of our
—air, air, air and air—
carved-out crater of impact.
Alluvial
They say God’s voice in the city
sounds like a man but in the desert
sounds like a woman. His voice, the spine
of nighttime, sounds like water.
Rock grazed by streamlets long enough
will sunder. One word against my sternum and
I unzip.
Monogamist
I’ve fallen ________ with him, stupid
cliché, with his dark blue
officewear. Maybe
I just love my little boy too much—he
looks like him—itself a grievous treason.
Just ask my older son. Ask
the husband. Ask anyone. Ask
the language for one decent synonym
and watch it stutter: perseveration,
obsession, attention to detail
aren’t love exactly nor is
chastity enough punishment.
My Beautiful Wickedness
Someone dropped a house on me
and stole my blood shoes.
The girl with her skipping and singing
comes to kill me. What then will become
of my spells, sole treasure I possess?
What I see when what I see
is not there—I know he feels it.
Looking at him like this
isn’t a spell to make him
love anyone
but might. All the good wife
wants is to go home.
When no one watches
I teach the dog to fly.
Floating Wick in Petrol
I am too happy to see him.
Someone must be blamed. Perhaps
the therapist or my marrying young.
Say, are you really this beautiful?
I dream a woman puts a gun in my mouth
to make me choose—lustrous, sleek, sexed.
Next a jade green sandal from a bottom
drawer. Suede wedge with straps
that wind around my shin. My foot
in the smooth cradle is lavish, ignitable.
Please, say you are a dress I can put on for tonight,
say you are a gun or untouched leather
purse, a beaded belt or denim
patch or felt-bottomed box or basted hem, say
you are a spiral binding or photo of a forest
framed in beeswax, say a hat pin, say a buckle
say a gun or polished knob, say anything
Bridle
I promised to stay steady,
but who knew the rage
of arbors?
Forests, groves, flagpoles,
Stand, we told them. Stay.
When we set up the blocking,
marked my toe-stops with tape,
I can’t describe it—
how my shoes abrade,
fit, like casket.
Thought, Antithoughts
I’ve nothing to hold him,
suspect I’ve been dreaming—
a woman awake, her
husband breathing—she wants
to be anywhere.
He’s a man
who happened to notice
I made him want
to play guitar
but he didn’t. This is the winter
the husband started snoring
and science said free will
is a feeling we believe in.
Post hoc confabulation.
I must get up and attend
the microorganisms.
Sex
Wane, wax, wobble.
My mind is a map of hunger.
They say Abulafia could stop his heart
with one letter. Alef
lodged in his semi-lunar valve.
Small e after breath is what I do to keep living.
What Is Not Science Is Art Is Nature
I am dreaming a hole right into the voice of God.
Straight into the dark place where my children were made
but can’t follow me back to. Right into the room
whose windows are too high up to see out,
though the sloped roof is too low for me to stand up.
In New York snow is unusual, arrives like childhood
memories that might not have happened, disappears
without changing anything. But do we say,
when it snows, because some countries
don’t believe in snow, I dreamed of snow? No, we say the news was right or wrong.
We say this strong desire for a window—huge square
glass through which a child standing up in a crib
at night alone in a room at the bottom