A Brief History of Divorce
Comes from the Greek: Divide Divert.
Now diverse issues deter demand until death
do part. Deuteronomy decreed if a captive
consort failed to please, her master could leave
her, but Matthew said divorce was a concession
to the injured party, meaning, often, the faithful
deservers of freedom. So: (which) chicken (threw
the first) egg? The first legal Puritan divorce
was in 1639, but even that started sometime before;
such actions begin with thoughts based on other
thoughts. It never occurred to me as a solution,
the way it did you, pacing around, your sapphire
robe spinning around your pale sacrificial calves,
so I'd say you started it. Jesus said it was the hard-
ness of human hearts that made it possible, not to say
OK. But he wasn't talking about us; we're faithless
atheists. (And I think it was your head
that was hard.) The concept of constructive
abandonment implied it took two or more
to weave a tangle, opening the way to no fault
because everyone's to blame when the veil
blows aside and all's betrayed. Your resolute dissolution
/ disposition of marriage was supposed to be a success-
ful completion, like graduation or paying off a mortgage,
some fairy tale or myth of travail and prevail:
how'd that work out for you, my brother?−
but for me it was getting kicked out of school,
fired from my post, and evicted, and then winning
a lottery, like I somehow got that surfeit of opportunities
you'd wanted for yourself. Then again, everyone knows
all those lottery winners remain losers and end up even worse
off, amirite? So, let's just call it even.
On the Cusp of Wakefulness
I think about my mother,
last seen in 1986 decked red
and fuchsia, taking corners
too fast in her Plymouth duster
we called the blue bomber,
still making my nose itch.
She thought she'd make a sexy man,
so maybe she went undercover,
an earthy intellectual high school dropout
yelling during football or pinochle, games
but quiet around other women, mothers
of my classmates: wives of doctors
or lawyers. A night owl, and extrovert,
was she as my own genes say I should
be, but I'm a dawn-breaking introvert,
like my father, who was not, as I used
to fantasize, the mailman, or some
dashing husband of one of her friends,
but her own husband, who outlived
her by nearly two decades. Love,
she taught me, is like fashion: a text
both subversive and conformist
set to conceal and reveal in equal
measure. I wonder what she'd think
of my life, or what she does think,
of my bedazzled jeans and glib wants,
my tragi-comedic multiple careers,
the cat who flings herself against
me; stares, knowingly, into my eyes
and, occasionally, gentles her teeth
into my wrist.
Julie Benesh is author of the chapbook About Time, published by Cathexis Northwest Press. Her poetry collection Initial Conditions is forthcoming in March, 2024, from Saddle Road Press. She has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places. She earned an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. Read more at juliebenesh.com.