What nobody tells you about marriage is
It’s blackheads and popping
pustules. It’s watching someone
get old in the shower. Its tweezers
and hair in the drain and knowing
where the scissors are. It’s three
hour long fights about what kind
of litter to buy at the pet store
and knowing you are both responsible
for all those egg shells. Both on the hook
for that $60 parking ticket, no matter
whose fault it was. It’s remembering
the good times, and also getting undressed
down to your worst layers. It’s lying
on the bed in a pile of your own tears
from laughing so hard, and it’s like having
a mirror that follows you around reciting
everything you’ve ever done
wrong. It’s agreeing to destroy someone
else’s life together – your children,
your neighbors’ peace and quiet.
It’s mutually disappointing your parents
by trying to follow your dreams,
and its fruit flies because somebody left
orange peels under the bed, somebody left
tissue paper in the sink, somebody didn’t clean
out the blender again. It’s knowing
what they had for breakfast, demanding
they leave some over, demanding they pick up
bread on the way home, pick up the orange juice,
pick up their goddamn socks from the living room.
It’s asking someone to pass the salt and open
the blinds and hand you that thing off the shelf
and knowing what that thing is.
It’s confessing that you’re still unhappy,
that their love isn’t enough to fix you.
It’s slamming windows, and books and screens.
It’s walking into the other room and slamming
the door shut. It’s knowing there are no working
locks on the door. It’s knowing when you lie
to yourself, somebody will catch you
like a net catches a trapeze artist
or a fish that’s wriggling in the sea.
What I did while waiting to become famous on instagram
I worked in a daycare.
I took the names of the tired mothers,
the hurried fathers. I gathered
emergency contacts, checked
for allergies, for ear infections, for anything I should know.
With the older kids, I recapped
the markers, folded
paper into airplanes, pulled
Barbie’s decapitated head
out of the toilet every day
after lunch. I helped
fill the bottles. Helped
handle the diapers. Helped
empty the waste baskets, rerolled
the toilet paper.
Between shifts I made appointments
for my ailing parents, made calls
to my sister to ask
how her invitro was going,
if there was anything I could bring.
I made $10/hour. Paid
my taxes. For a whole year I gave up
eating peanut butter because of other people’s allergies.
For 9 months I lifted someone else’s baby
to my milkless breast
and tended to the future,
with its immediate, anonymous needs.
Tresha Faye Haefner
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize and three Pushcart nominations. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear,” was a finalist for prizes from Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. Find out more on her Substack at thepoetrysalonstack.substack.com.
