Mary Honaker
THE KAVANAUGH DEBATE
The woman dissects herself carefully,
picks each jellied trauma out with tweezers,
arranges them on a table, labels them.
“I know this is hard to see,” she says,
“For years, I didn’t want to show you.
But I promise this is important.”
All across the country women feel the scalpel,
feel their bodies pried open
and held open with a vise: pulsing
within them the nights they’d forgotten,
promised themselves didn’t matter,
promised their husbands they’d gotten over.
I shouldn’t have to tell you this hurts.
Numb faced, their bodies open bird cages,
the women slog through the days.
Some men are afraid. They see these adult faces
and are curveballed back into their youth,
slam into the event like a ball in a mitt,
dust flying up at the force of impact.
They see her face, elven in its youth, and see
these grown grotesque pageants of living death,
and they do the math. Some of them will point and laugh,
howling, saying, “What a weak display! What a lie!”
These words insert new pins in the tacked-down
lumps of flesh. They write new labels over the old, pin them
all over the first woman, but every woman feels
the stick. Days go on like this.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Lake, and elsewhere. Mary Ann holds a BA in philosophy from West Virginia University, a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.