Tuesday, June 16, 2009


I wash your ankles
with my tears. Unhem
my sweep of hair
and burnish the arch of your foot.
Still your voice cracks above me.

I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.
A dark towel
like the one after sex.
I'm walking out,
my face a dustpan,
my body stiff as a new broom.

It is the old way that girls
get even with their fathers --
by wrecking their bodies on other men.

--Louise Erdrich, "Mary Magdalene"

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