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 Contents | October 2002 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Skipping the State
by Marilyn Krysl .....  Hear the author read this poem (in RealAudio)Know I did not speak ill of you when you left me weeping and pregnant in the suburbs, for that girl with spiked hair and a tongue ring. I have not defaulted on the mortgage, or revealed to your enemies your smoldering secret—how you liked it when I pretended to have betrayed you with Robert and you turned on the spit of minor-league jealousy, the kind with no penalty, since you knew I was faking. Nor in regard to naughtier longings did I turn loquacious, nor list for other women your shortfalls. Grant me, then, the child-support payments, which, after all, result from your indulgence and my gullibility, trusting that things you said in private might be taken literally. Forgetting, under the spell of your rhetoric, that declarations men make while inside women will be retroactively rescinded on withdrawal. Though you, of all people, had the temerity to question my fidelity—believe me, the child is ours. In honor, then, of our son's innocence, rise, please, to this fiduciary occasion.
Marilyn Krysl, a poet and short-story writer, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize in 1996 for Warscape With Lovers. Her most recent book of stories is How to Accommodate Men (1998). Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; October 2002; Skipping the State; Volume 290, No. 3; 134. |
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