Chronic Pain
A woman finds her husband has been on dating apps / she regrets looking through his iPad / insomnia / This isn’t the first time she’s had to find the hammer / Sometimes it’s in the junk drawer, sometimes under the sink / It seems to appear in her hand / She rubs her thumb over its steel head— cold & smooth & hardened like memory / Eight years earlier this woman earned a modest advance for her book / She bought a laptop / The day she approved the galleys, she went into labor / Her husband covered his eyes with his Dodgers hat / he couldn’t watch //
Their daughter broke through the amniotic sac / The new mother didn’t sleep for months / She soaked her swollen vagina in warm water, filled hospital gloves with ice and stuffed them into her panties to soothe the stitched flesh / Before long, she found herself using the hammer on the laptop— shards of glass & silicon & plastic landed in the creases of the stroller /
Her daughter is older and / she watches her mother on the front porch smashing the iPad with a hammer / her father comes home with a new tattoo that spells her mother’s name in cursive / as the girl’s thumb rubs over the bandage, she wonders how much it hurt.
