Adrian Blevins

The Way She Figured He Figured It

You get over these constant storms and learn to be married all over again, every day.

--Barry Hannah

The foyer is hers because the kettle is hers as it was made for water and the water is hers
         because the sac that grew the baby was hers though the semen that made the sac was his
                        like his boots are his and the tea that's of the kettle

after it enters his mouth is his unless it's hers since it's inside the kitchen that's hers

and therefore not his unless he's simmering the Asian sauces that are his
         because they're dense and knotty rather than milkish and paltry
                        like everything else from the nation state of the motherland

of the no-mercy child who won't stop sucking and wanting and whining in the ear that is his

although the child herself belongs somehow to the woman and thus its hunger is hers
         as is the bed and dresser and mirror and latch
                        though the hammer naturally is his and the saw and lumber

and back and muscle he suffered to build because he guessed he thought it would be

good for something besides this house like a pestilence of people who weren't his
         because nothing was his except the whirl he carried in his belly of the mix-up
                        of loving her in the first place like being sucked

into a burrow of lava embers and putting your tongue to it until it caught fire

and all he could say was that the burn was his--this hole in the mouth--
         this fiasco of the woman bent now in the garden to smell the cilantro
                        as though she didn't know his head was split

with hating her and loving her and hating her and loving her

because she was an ache and a kink and somehow the furrow--the groove and the rut--
         and age and death and kiss and fuck and not-fuck and song and not-song
                        and no it was not sweet though he'd go on and carry it

                                      since also--since mostly--it was.

---

Adrian Blevins' The Brass Girl Brouhaha was published by Ausable Press in 2003 and won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (Bright Hill Press, 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, and many other magazines and journals. New poems are forthcoming in TriQuarterly and Pleiades. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. photograph by Lilian Kemp contents | previous