My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself

to please my father who’d make me

tiptoe from wall to wall then back again

to improve my lacking calves

or worm the ground like a vacuum

palming the carpet for bits of trash

he’d count in my little hands. When I spilled

a cupful of crushed chili flakes

on my Chapagetti noodles, he forced

the whole hot bowl down my throat

as I sobbed. And he ordered my hair pulled

back, always, in a ponytail. It wasn’t until

I neared forty that I discovered

them—the women I’d twisted myself into

for the men I loved—all slumped in my gut

like a heap of secondhand costumes.

Once, I followed a man into a hurricane

minutes before it stripped half of Manhattan

from power. I trailed behind him

when the transformer line exploded

and the night sky flashed a ghastly

green like God smothering the city

with a neon sheet. Then the traffic lights,

streetlights, and every last lamp through

every window flickered then snapped,

and in that alarming darkness, the city shrank

into a closet so cramped I couldn’t breathe.

Still, I stood in that downpour

on a sixth-story roof to hold up his boom mic

as he recorded the storm. For another,

I became a Ron Paul for President

groupie. I scanned Reddit in my homemade

campaign shirt while smoking weed

to white boy emo tracks about tommy guns

and existentialism the same year

I voted for Obama. For yet another,

I learned to ride a bike. Even managed one

from the Village to the GW Bridge,

but when the path clogged

halfway up with bikers on three sides of me

close enough to kiss, I forgot

how to brake. I threw out my hands

to grab the highway divider and collapsed,

then I hauled up the rental to finish the trek,

bloody knuckles and knees be damned.

And for hundreds of mornings, I woke

each morning before the morning—

not even two hours after last call in the city—

to blend spinach and strawberries

with flaxseed meal and hemp seeds for a man

to take to work. And when one provoked

a drunk stranger then couldn’t meet a deadline

with his battered head, I let him

turn me into a comic book android.

I wrote pages upon pages of   a monologue

he fed to the robot, fashioned

by a toymaker who loved her the way

he thought he loved me.

He injected her with scene after scene

from my childhood, and in the final issue,

haunted by my life, she screams,

Stop inventing me!   before she claws open

her chest and yanks out a fat blue gem

carved like a heart. And during a spell

when I was shackled to no man, I got naked

in a room full of naked people, all of us

drunk and stoned, seated in a circle

like schoolchildren waiting for some game

to begin or for the morning hello song,

the kind that loops until you’ve hollered

everybody’s name. At daylight, I drove

the prettiest of the girls home. The one

some men bragged they could bed

with a fat stack of C-notes, the one

who eventually married the mayor’s son.

She had a habit of   laughing

at everything everyone said and danced

with her hands above her head like someone

panicking with a pistol pointed at her face.

For years leading up to that day,

I thought she was the sort of woman

I was supposed to be—nonthreatening

with a body that inspired valuation.

She insisted she ride with me

instead of with the boys hovering over her

like a flight of hungry kestrels. And minutes

into the drive, it became clear she wanted

something from me, something like

absolution. Approval maybe.

And she said, I feel sad. And she said,

I don’t know who that was, I don’t know why

I did that—that being what we’d all done

all throughout the night, and I admit

I was rankled by her conscience, clanging

louder than mine, which was bored

of my neglect by then and resigned

to watching my life lurch forward without it.

When my father wasn’t sculpting

or smacking me, he said I was made

in the image of God. So God I became,

forging myself each time I found a man

to die for. I was the creator, the crucified,

the wildfire slamming against their chests.

I read what they read, and I drank

what they mixed. I bent the way they bent me

to do what they invented. And how I charmed

their brothers. How I disarmed

their mothers—the lemony dolmas,

the pink pork meatballs I rolled with them,

the dough I pinch-pulled then dunked

in anchovy broth. And when I married

the last man I loved, as the woman

I thought I was, I woke one night

like a jinn horrified to find herself

fixed in her final incarnation. I stopped

recognizing myself to such a degree

that some days I’d wake having forgotten—

really, I’d forget—we had an actual child.

I morphed into a serpent, a tempest.

I struck myself against our domestic walls

like a mad bat trapped in a coop.

And my husband—who from the beginning

looked at me like he understood

I was not his, like he was willing

to take what he could get

for as long as I’d let him have it—refused

to enter my war. How bereft I was

left with no enemies. How I brawled

on that battleground alone with myself,

punching at nothing until I conjured

my multitudes. I wish I could say

I freed myself somehow. That I’d pried

those shadow selves from me

with a hex, a needle, a healing quartz.

Or that like the cloak of Bartimaeus,

they dropped in the dust

when I stripped myself to sprint toward

the savior’s voice. No. By then, I’d lost

that appetite for discarding myself.

I carried them, one by one,

like bride after bride across the threshold

and removed their boots. I drew baths

loaded with salts, cooked meals in butter.

I let each one sleep when she needed to sleep.

And in time, I thanked them.

I came to recognize their service.

And in time, they let me love them the way

a father or a mother ought to have loved them.

Them.

Yes, I suppose I do mean me.