The Abortion

When they met her hands could cradle a fish.
She could pluck his smallest hurts
Like barnacles from a baby's face.
And when he betrayed her with a woman
Twice her age and a boy half, she would hold
Her breath like a diver looking for pearls.
And when she was a girl, she would sit
On her alcoholic mother's lap and pick
Loose threads from her slip. Oh,
Life is a sinker, Death a threaded worm,
Her mother's wriggling finger, making her squirm.
One must be as the fisherman Christ,
One must weave a net of solitary days:
The pressed dress waiting on the bed,
The doorbell untouched as her nipples,
The windows changing seasons like slides,
The fish tank furiously reproducing,
The neighbors' merciless undisciplined kids,
The traffic of funerals underneath her fire escape,
The hysterectomy underneath her pants,
The bitten fingernails and the feet too pigeon-toed to dance.
But the shark has bitten the net and bloodied her wrist.
She runs the twisted bedsheet between her legs
And can't understand why he not she is allowed to exist.
She's forgotten exactly the means of his crime.
She can't recall his idiosyncrasies, even his name.
But she knows there's a fishy smell in this room
And she began a note though she's crumpled it where?
She wrote, "I'm no longer angry, I'm no longer sad.
I've just had it, I've honestly had."