While you were away I laid my body down

like a sacrifice on the frozen ground beneath the lunar
eclipse. Imagined you’d perished in a war. Remembered
your birthday but said nothing. Welcomed my husband
back from his trip overseas. Made pancakes. Studied
the Roche limit. Packed lunches. Opened windows. Peeled
tangerines. Wrote poems I can’t share. Wiped crumbs
off the stove. Didn’t pay attention in conversation. Calculated
your waking hour. Folded blankets. Drew a bath for someone
else. Imagined waking next to you. Watched breath leave
my body like sacrificial smoke, vanishing as if its existence
was only yearning. Cut a smokebush to the ground. Imagined
being so close as to breathe my poison into your mouth,
your throat, your lungs, only to leave you gasping for more.
Lured my husband to bed to worship the only way he knows
(remembered yearning exists only in the pauses that allow
for breath: ellipsis, em dash, parentheses, question mark,
Oxford comma, period). Raked a pile of last year’s leaves
to uncover a cluster of snowdrops pushing blindly toward
the belief of an unseen light, pale for the lack thereof
yet blooming. Watched the smokebush finally rise from
its scars, shock of delicate panicles curving into the August
heat, blood red parentheticals containing my winter violence.

When I think of you I dress for darkness

In midnight lace you’ll never see. Magenta robes that fall to my feet. Aubergine satin smeared with rubied roses, thin straps crossing the meridian of my body. You’re not here to slide them across the pale slope of my shoulders until they slip away in silence. You’re not here to glide a hand underneath, silk pooling as you work your way up from the floor. Valley. Waterfall. Labyrinth. Bare field. Are you weary? Stop and rest your head. You’ve arrived only in my dream; I only imagine you making space for yourself with your hands, fingering the spring’s dewed petals, exhaling heavy air that gives way to the heated summer storm. Is it selfish to abandon my life momentarily to stand in that downpour? To summon you from the world you’ve created? To hope your lightning strikes me dead? You’re not here so I dress in pale yellow cotton. In phases of the moon. In words sent backward through time. I dress to run barefoot through barren fields in winter, screaming and undone. I dress in your absence. I dress for the husband. I dress for our silence. I dress for the marriage. I dress for nothing. I dress for no one. I dress in your shadow. I dress for the dead.

La Nuit

All night we breath cool vapor
from the humidifier humming on the floor
while outside, snow piles gently on frostbitten
berries refused by even the hungriest of winter birds.
We lie on the bed, two twin mattresses lined up
side by side, covered with a flat sheet one size too small.
I sleep on the divide where the two meet.
The husband drapes his arm over his face, blocking
the meager light that seeps through a sheet draped
over the single-pane window. He turns predictably
away. I want to curl around him, find my way into
his dreams, which grow more fantastic with each night’s
snow. He desires hot concrete, traffic, picturesque
nightfalls created by the sun sinking through a thick
haze of smog, year-round summer, metal-fenced yards
of rock and sand, a vast ocean of blondes. And though I am
now blonde, I am not dreaming. I am awake, sitting upright
in our makeshift life. Downstairs, stitches hold closed
an incision in my brother’s neck through which
doctors removed lymph nodes swollen with cancer,
black thread pulled taut as a Balanchine ballerina. Admit
there is pleasure in tension, even this, even in counting bones
within fragile bodies as they leap and land, lift
winter limbs to the chilled air en pointe, as if
there is only this dance rehearsed to bleak perfection
and no hunger or breaking or bleeding backstage.

Jennifer Molnar

Jennifer Molnar is the author of the chapbook Occam's Razor, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Luna Luna Magazine, miniMag, Bellevue Literary Review, New South, Hawai'i Review, So to Speak, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from George Mason University and resides in New York.