Way back at the beginning,
you said something mean,
unfair.
I dialed your mother’s number
hoping
that hearing her voice
would make you see the light.
I held the phone up in the air
between us.
We could hear her:
Hello? Hello?
We both held our breath.
I chickened out and hung up.
Then I stepped in dog shit
on the kitchen floor, from
our new puppy,
and you laughed. I threw
an orange at you, but it crashed
through a window. I wept
while sweeping up
broken glass.
Anna Kendall says: “I was married for twenty-six years to a very successful man. These poems emerged seven years later because I wanted to forgive myself, because I needed to cough them up, to purge the vile memories, because I desperately needed to make sense of a long and
abusive marriage.
My ex-husband was a sex addict. It’s hard to explain how his extreme narcissism affected me – my poems say it best. For now, let me just say that to live with this kind of man is a very lonely existence because any kind of touching has nothing at all to do with love.”
