Theresa Boyar - Three Poems
The Recruitment of Doors
Geographic Tongue
Clipping Coupons with Medusa
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The Recruitment of Doors
Mincing onions, you say nothing
is so criminal in a woman as pettiness.
Pettiness: your nails a scarlet blur
over the cutting board, that shedding
of concern for family, all that believing
one's self is so important,
all that believing that one
has a self.
There are hungry men beyond this
kitchen door, I don't need to be reminded.
They are bound to us by rings and blood.
You, now trussing poultry,
say a woman is like a door,
an entry, a way of guiding men
from one existence to another.
There are moments when your eyes drop focus
and I'm convinced you're reliving past events,
scenes where you were knocked down just a little,
nick by nick whittled away.
Survival must have compelled you
to accept your lot with lust, a growing
preoccupation with trying to enlist others
towards the glory of your way,
recruiting more doors for your men to walk through
tall as redwoods.
There is something divine in the way you stand,
straight as wood, and sometimes I can see you
as you must see yourself:
a giantess in the forest, admitting men
to walk beneath the towering whiteness
of your thighs. Knowing you could deny
passage if you wish, knowing you could crush them,
but holding back.
First published in the Adirondack Review
Geographic Tongue
In the dentist's chair that day of diagnosis,
I stared past the clinical lamps and white walls
and imagined my tongue traveling places,
wandering warm jungles or sloping down
the clear-juiced skins of glaciers, I mean really
going somewhere. It sounded sexy
and I admit I felt almost slutty, reclining there
with my plucky geographic tongue.
The assistant didn't fool me.
When she nodded her head in agreement,
I could see she was really thinking,
there's no telling
where this tongue has been.
Then came the scientific name, migratory glossitis,
and an explanation that different foods set it off.
Eggplant, pineapple, whiskey. Swallow a trigger
and force a migration, a colony of crimson
patches traveling my tongue. There was nothing
malicious about it, nothing spectacular.
A benign condition, he said.
And like that it was back
to a boneless worm behind my teeth.
Brought down, tethered
to my throat, pock marks
crowded on the bloated lap
of my mouth. I didn't take it well.
Not the diagnosis, but the way
extraordinary was peeled away, leaving
bland routine. It was like spending
a few moments feeling beautiful,
so rarely beautiful, until your compact
snaps open and there you are,
all cracked lips, mottled skin,
and poppy-seeded smile.
Clipping Coupons with Medusa
She goes for fifty cents off Herbal Essence,
snatching it from my hands and lingering
close, while a dozen sparking tongues
licorice-whip my neck.
It's called denial, I want to say,
but she'll blow up the way she always does,
ranting about some clod who gets off on dolphins
or bashes waves with his little phallic trident.
She's had it with the bad hair day jokes,
the nips around her shoulders
from when she forgets herself
and makes some sudden move.
The others got off easy, she says.
She says: Poor dears, charmed into
cows and bears, it must be tough.
She clips and sighs and makes plans to redeem
her stack of coupons, lingering over a Harley
Barbie ad. In my scissors, I watch her
trace the leather jacket. The tawny locks,
the bitty crimson scarf. She sinks
a grayish nail into the skin above her lip,
draws blood to correspond
to Barbie's manufactured beauty mark.
Beneath us, the carpet disappears, shrouded
with slivers of newsprint and snakeskin
tunnels that drift like fumbled condoms.
When I tilt my blades again, her hair is shining,
slick and wet as birth. She squeezes
her scissors and slices Barbie's feet.
Times like this, she's focused on redemption,
on one more chance, a shot to drop her skin
and step back to that moment in the temple.
What could she have done differently?
What could she have changed?
Between us, nothing
but the sound of cool blades
scything little dotted lines.
