Vocabulary Lessons
At thirteen, I look up bruise in the thesaurus,
like the bruises
on my best friend’s arms and legs,
and I find contusion.
Later I check innocence and discover naiveté,
a word that fits her
when she tells me her father
never beat her when she was younger
because she was such a good child then.
“His own sweet girl.”
She says he could be kind sometimes,
like on her 13th birthday when he bought her
a dress of lavender
with light green lollipops
floating like cartoon balloons across the bodice,
the sleeves puffy with innocence, and a hem
that rode high over her bare knees.
He asked her to wear it around the house,
“just for him,”
“A possible example of incest,” I think,
relishing the word with its sibilant hiss.
But when Father Francis
tells the class
it’s unholy to have a cynical mind.
I hear sin in the word cynical.
The next year, I find sapient
in the dictionary
and learn it comes from the Latin, sapere:
to know, to taste.
It sounds like serpent, like the woman,
the fruit, the tree,
the whole damn history of shame.
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and four full-length collections: The Zen Piano Mover, from NFSPS Press, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award; In the Body of Our Lives, released by Sixteen Rivers Press; Everything Turns Into Something Else, runner-up for the Grayson Books Prize; and, most recently, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Alaska Review, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.
