Ode to the other woman

Emily R. Daniel

who refused the bed where I sleep, opting instead
for the kitchen counter, quartz cooling folds
between cheek and thigh and walls against which

her back pressed as if she hung from plaster
beside pictures of my dead father, a cigar dangling
from his smile, and where my husband hooked his hand,

for leverage, around the shelf brackets I chose
so he could suspend her there as art in front of which
tourists might form a semicircle, resting jaws against knuckles,

cocking heads to understand from a different angle
if this piece speaks of praise or sorrow— how she turned
her face away from my glasses on the counter,

my love note posted to the refrigerator door, how that turn
opened the distance from her ear to shoulder’s edge,
reddened by the sanding from his facial hair, remnants

of which I wiped from the bathroom sink that morning
and scrawled in marker on the mirror I love you,
which is hard for a stranger to believe, though I imagine

she likes to return home thinking I am thankful
for her and how tonight my husband will fall asleep easily
and there will be hours of stillness, my back cradled

in the mattress scoops we have carved out, ebb tide markings
from what withdraws every day and always returns

Emily R. Daniel's chapbook, Life Line, was selected as a winner of the 2020 Celery City Chapbook prize. Her poems can be found in The Bangalore Review, Olit Magazine, and forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Review, among others. Emily lives with her family in Kalamazoo, MI where she is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Western Michigan University.