First Marriage
I spent what I earned on potato bread from a German bakery.
Sometimes our only meal for days, we ate it by the fistful,
We were young and hungry and our bodies could run on cheap
chocolate and fallen apples from other people’s trees.
Those first winters, ice blanketed our world: each blade,
a silver needle, each branch, a sword. It wasn’t safe to walk,
but I slid-shuffled anyway, craving solitude and danger.
I could not speak of the frost creeping in my lungs.
I have forgotten your handwriting. I have not forgotten the waiting.
I waited on the curb, in the cold, for hours. You left me
in your mind long before I left you in body. You left me
to make the decision alone. Ours was a slow death.
I have forgotten your little sister’s coffin, but I have not forgotten
her grave where your father hoped we would all spend the rest
of our days. He did not know we each grieve our own way.
He never saw your gifts. My pity was our strongest bond.
Ours was a slow death, so I ran until my skull ached. My knees
and shins. You dreamed of boats, a watery house you could control.
You would outwit death. My pity was our strongest bond.
I dreamed of disappearing. Hungry skin stretched over my ribs.
Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work has been published in Grey Matter, Porcupine, and New Verse News and is forthcoming in Imagist, Potomac Review, and Right Hand Pointing.
