Marriage of Equals

i.

Let the whole town suffer quietly

in their marriages and motels. Buses

crawl the highways

like fat cockroaches

skitter across the wall. Leave

one town and it’ll catch you again farther

down the interstate, only the hotel

names have changed. Road’s broken.

ii.

When roaches hissed their legs

across my bedspread as a kid, I cringed.

Thick insect bodies glinting, bronze before

the greening, like Greek heroes laid prone

in sculpture: that brutal last twitch

caught in cast. A body splayed and hitched.

A cockroach is the hero knocked low

by memory, facing a death a day,

pierced through yet swaggering

along the smoke-stained wall of a Motel 6.

I hated the roaches. Only later I learned

their movement mirrors your heartbeat

when a man inches you closer to the faded

wall with every thrust, the trunks of his limbs

pinning you to the mattress.

They move like they know fear.

iii.

It’s the people who can survive

anything that are most afraid. You know better

the measure of your body, then,

the time you told your husband

you just wanted to sleep, and still your duty

is to gape like a toothing mouth, except your mouth’s

teeth are loaded in your gums like bullets, lips

rimming a slim dark space from which spit dribbles

when you reach for air where the air should be

and instead catch the thick fabric of a sinner’s body.

Surviving that, you know exactly when you break,

at which point you will not be able to abide,

you know you’ll be called upon to cross that threshold anyway.

If a wedding dress is 99 cents at the corner store,

no one asks why, or stops to notice it’s inset with slow-hatching gems:

bugs and eggs. We just buy it, incredulous

of beauty at such a low cost in a town where

you can’t hang the washing out on the clothesline:

by the time it’s dry it’s scourged by dirt and worse

darks kicked up by fleet wheels of the cars,

whose road plunges through our sore hearts

like a concrete javelin.

Eventually we all must become something else

in surviving what’s been given to us.

iv.

I married young and didn’t think much about it,

besides the beauty of the dress, absent any other way

of making a life in a town whose industry

shriveled behind it like a failed amputation.

I loved the dress, tolerated my fiancé, and hated the roaches

in the house I grew up in: watched by the silent eyes of bugs,

which dropped into the flat grey highways, the failing hotels,

the fields and mines resentful of the men who gouged them. After a wedding,

you never get to wear the dress again. Maybe

if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have married him;

the dress was off minutes after we walked in the door. No beauty

that night, no beauty the next. Sometimes, shifts he’s working, I still unfurl

the dress from behind his uniforms, let the fabric drop like my consonants

at the ends of words – when I speak at all, not much, these days.

There are roaches in this house, too,

I had noticed the third night he snored by my side, their wings crinoline.

I see them scuttling into the corners of the closet when I pull out the dress.

Their wings are miniature hemlines, sheer and fluttering like fabric

when the wind of a good dance is blown up into it. Our beauty is hoary,

the froth of my dress hem skims the stubbly ground like roachs’ wings

taste air hesitant before flight. They’ve gotten used to me,

lights off and twirling; they emerge from the holes in the wood

and take up the waltz, a diaphanous latticework of

stiches and veins. We dance in our twin dresses.

No matter where you go along the highway, our houses and hotels

host weddings for roaches. Their wings hatch rattling sweetheart

necklines, the beauty of every flight.