REDEMPTION
When she awoke where she should not have been,
the black of sin filled the room and sat on her
like the weight of her sobbing five-year-old curled
on her for comfort, shaking her with grief so profound
that words could not hold it, release it, send it across
Lethe and set her free. She smelled the weed, their rutting,
the damp of a room whose windows didn’t open,
their stale sweat. She heard him, his low snore like the air
conditioner that didn’t work. She could feel it,
the snore, like a burr coming through the bed to her.
The room was dark dark as she rose, no light slipping
by heavy double curtains, and she felt her way
toward the bathroom where she turned on the light and used
its spill to find her clothes, her phone, the life she had
briefly left. She was still stoned—God, she hadn’t been
stoned since college, long before teaching, marriage, children—
feeling warm and pleased even as guilt grew in her
like his damn snoring. She already felt sore, too,
and saw that he’d bruised her breast, sucking hard as her
babies did years ago. Her clothes smelled, she smelled,
a silent confession her husband would hear
when she got home. She looked at herself and cursed.
She’d become her husband, become the things she ignored
and hated and prayed weren’t true in spite of what her nose
and eyes and hands told her. But it had felt so good
to act without thinking, to forget everyone
else, to answer only to her body’s desires.
