Chains
Rent from DeepDyve- Chains
Lunch today at Au Bon Pain, which meansin French “good bread.” In English, painis never good. Or it’s not supposedto be. But I do like it when
a lover pulls my hair. Is thatthe sort of thing we learnin the womb? Soak up with allthe other junk our mothers
craved? Mine ate liverwurst on ryeevery day. How else to explainwhy I love liverwurst, too. Or how it feltto find Fifty Shades of Grey
on my mother’s dresser. I was home to feedher cat but went snoopingin her room. Not snooping exactly,I like to see her things. Her tray
of perfumes, her neatly foldedlingerie. And her cedar chestI opened, fingered her silver, tried onher chains. Behind all that
the book. I thought my motherdidn’t read, but I could see she’d read this [End Page 170]
and read well. Its spine wascracked. Pages smudged, dogeared
as if to save a placeto pause. Savor. Reread. The questionunderlined in ink: Suppose he returns with a cane,or some weird kinky implement? No,
I don’t suppose. I won’t. I can’timagine my mother supposing. Not shewith her menagerie of Willow Tree statuettesfrom Hallmark, arranged just so,
some of them angels—you knowby their wings—others just womenwho are wingless, attachedto smaller figures, which must be
children. There’s something eerie about them,the designer’s choice to make them—the angels, the childrenthe women—identically faceless. [End Page 171]
Jen DeGregoio’s poetry and prose have appeared in Apogee, the Baltimore Review, the Collagist, the Rumpus, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student in English at Binghamton University (suny), where she serves as assistant director of the Binghamton Poetry Project.
