Eve Responds

I am identified an enemy in my home.
Can’t do anything right. My very name
bad. All babble, all violence.

Even this violence won’t negate all
I cherish since I left: herons
and shooting stars, cattails and rooster tails,
the damp dew on the last stalks
here, outside the Garden, along the banks
of the slough filling with grey water
under a gunmetal sky. All I have left
after work with other women trying to leave.
The battle out here fragile as a bone,
a collarbone, say, or a wrist slammed
against a wall, my neck, for instance,
never the same
and the hole in the plaster
a wound in the wall
a ghost in the house hidden
by the makeshift coat rack he made
before selling the place. Still there,
the violence, the exit.

Lord, don’t judge what I need
who I am in this life of desperation.
Wine to kill the pain, sex to kill the pain,
needles, tv. I know it, I know all of it
and it’s all violence, babble, enemy.
Unleashed from the Garden
kneeling on the banks of the slough
I live yet.

Jenny Root