Archive of Absence
BY JO BEAR
after Meg Day & The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
It might have been
the late-night cast
of fluorescence where once
there had only been moon
or perhaps the squall
of muscle—an arm
flexing around a waist.
If we could have known,
we would have parted
our lips for no man. Backed
against a plane of teak,
desire opened its mouth
& rattled loose something
in each of us—a pebble
skipping its eager legs
further from shore. For some
of us, this was a first
touching of feet to flame.
When we smiled, we
were nothing soft.
There had been husbands, names
taken from a father
& spackled across our teeth.
We spat them out with husks
of sunflowers & crests of tobacco
juice. Sometimes all we had
of our own was the propulsion
of leg over grass.
A glove was our brother’s
or our cousin’s or a made
thing we stitched as hemlines
nipped at our ankles.
We admitted to ourselves & then
to each other the clutching
shape of want—moved it from
a yoke at our shoulders
to a span of pine slung low & warm
in our hands. Under this new
moon, we pushed up the pale pink
ligature of worn skirts & ran
tongues over the scars, where
our skin flexed around
what we asked of it. We might
find each other in the wild
of the world—might feel how
desperation bowed
like a gentleman if only to catch
a knowing return
through salt & smoke. We knew
that time was docile
only when we ran—kicking
plumes of dirt across
the powder our mothers pressed
into our skin where they
imagined a husband’s fingers
would trace bone.
There wasn’t yet an end to empire
but still the men
would return & we would stand
to attention with all
the irreverence of an unwound
fable: they brought
no tales we hadn’t already whispered
backwards. When asked,
we would say we admired the form
in motion: the drawl
of knee towards chest, hips
canting forwards as a lit
beacon, our palms open—not
to soothe, but to signal
each other home.
