—your college boyfriend’s wife
How do I put it: I fucked your husband
when we were both matches dragging
across a surface too smooth to catch—
I fucked your husband in sulfurous air.
It’s not fair, I know, to think about fucking
your husband when I see a picture of you three—
you and him and your new little girl—but
it happened when he was pre-husband material,
when he didn’t know how to unplug a toilet or
wipe a girl baby from front to back. He wasn’t
much of anything then—I’m not trying to be
unkind. He was the kind of guy who didn’t
wash his sheets, and I was the kind of woman
who still believed there are kinds of women.
The kind who arranged my hours so I’d see him
just at the twilight of his drinking, when he liked me
best. The kind who washed my sheets in a laundromat,
studying Auden and waiting for the rinse cycle. Lay
your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless
arm. Not even the pillow smelled of him after.