The report, leaked
to the one journalist
who doesn't trust
their single-psychopath
version of events,
screamed "classified"
in oversized red letters
on the cover, and when
he handed it to me he said,
I know who you are
and I know what's at stake.
Then he walked back to his car,
the clip-clop of his shoes
against the pavement
a rhythm I would undress him to
for days to come. You'll think
there really is another man,
but even if that's so, and it's not,
he's not this guy,
who manages to save my life 
only because he doesn't know
who he's fighting
when he shoulders open my front door
on the men who've come to kill me -
because if he did know
he'd lose himself fast,
somewhere, anywhere,
in the life a new name
and a new face,
if he could afford one,
would open for him.

He unearths in an airtight room
he's given access to 
by someone he once saved from jail 
photographs implicating two women,
one his ex-partner, the other his sister,
in a scheme to sell a new biotoxin
only ten other people know about.
A man who can't be anyone but you-
the birthmark on your neck is all the proof
I need - is taking money he's too greedy
to wait to count in private. Now I know
how we could afford this house
I've come back to
to empty, and I know
(I mean me now, the wife who's writing this)
I've taken this made-for-TV-movie-in-my-head
much farther than I should have,
because I start to plan, in case you do
lose your life while we're still married-
and it would be just like you
to lose it-which things of yours
to send your parents, which to keep
for our son when he's older
and which to burn. I
want nothing from you,
especially not these magazines
you insist on stocking
our bathroom with.
Can't you ever be without words
in front of your face?
Look at these ridiculous
"Verbs of Boro"
from Northeast India 
(I'm reading despite myself):
khonsay, to pick an object up with care;
dasa, not to place a fishing instrument;
asusu, to feel unknown in a new place.
You, no doubt, have memorized them all.
I'm thinking how the future tense
sounds like a Yiddish curse:
You should ur, dig soil like a swine,
or May your children gobray,
fall in a well unknowingly;

and that photograph
comes back to me
again, the body's face
covered by a cloth,
and so she is woman,
all of us at once,
and we, each of us,
are her, balanced dead
on the same narrow table,
arms hanging bruised
off the sides, breasts
the white I imagine
the old European poets meant
when they invoked the blinding whiteness
of a lover's skin,

but she was not white,
and she was not European,
and I wonder 
if the Japanese man
who did this to her
wiped her clean himself,
or if he ordered
some other Chinese -
her brother perhaps,
or her lover, or
a second woman
she'd never seen before -
to do it for him,
because there had to have been blood,

and what I felt when I saw it,
what I feel now
remembering it,
the way it comes to me
in my sleep, or fades into view
through a magazine ad
or movie scene, the way
I kept taking the book off the shelf
and crouching down
in the corner of Borders' lower level
to stare and stare,
for all of that
I want a verb;

and I want a verb as well,
and it's not rape,
though certainly he raped her,
for the sword hilt rising
from between her parted thighs
and for the hope
she was already dead 
when he buried his blade in her;
and a verb too
for the way I hate myself
because no matter how hard I try
I can't not want to know
what he saw, what he wanted
us to see, in the parody
of his own flesh
the upcurve of his protruding weapon 
can not help but be.
He knew who she was
and what was at stake,
and he's staked his claim
even now, seventy
years later, in me.

I turn the page.
"Silence=Rape." Shashir,
six years old, gang raped
near Goma, in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
When they found her
she was starving,
and when they found her
she could neither walk nor talk,
and they've stitched together
the parts of her the men ruptured,
and they've fed her, given
her clothing, and she sleeps
in a bed that is not the bush
where the militia left her to die,
and maybe the tent walls
shaping the room that is
right now the only place she has to live
mean for her a kind of safety, but how
will language ever be a home for her
the way it is for us? She also needs a verb.

I turn the page again: a man's
rape conviction overturned
because technology at last caught up
with work a sloppy chemist
never double checked.
I want to say she owes him fifteen years,
just like I want to say you owe me twelve,
but I was not sloppy when I married you.
I've never told you this: The man
at the Johnny Winter concert
I hoped would talk to me
was two seats to your left.
I can see him now -
his chiseled face
adorns my movie's hero -
and if you hadn't tripped
over my bag
on your way to the bathroom,
and if I hadn't felt responsible
for the way your off-white linen pants
ripped along the left leg's seam -
which meant I could fix it,
which I offered to do -
we never would've gone to that café
I invited you to 
to make things right,
and I never would've felt
your voice filling my ears
the way you said an old lover's kisses
filled your mouth, 
like a wish that lingers 
before it vanishes for good
and all you have
is knowing you once wished it.

I wanted then to be a wish for you 
that wouldn't vanish,
and when the next day
you brought your pants for me to sew
and I said I'd need to keep them overnight,
and could we meet tomorrow after work
for me to return them,
I was picturing myself
slipping them from your hips
and cupping my palms
around your butt
to pull you more deeply into me.
Three times I changed my mind-
lavender or burgundy or teal?-
about which blouse would help me do that.
I chose the teal, which worked,
and so it's teal I'm wearing at the end
when my lover in his hospital bed
opens his eyes, the sign
I've been waiting for
that it's time to let go
of the future I'd created with you
and travel instead
wherever his love takes me.
I'm nowhere else but here, though,
halfway between our bedroom and our bath,
and I am angry: This story
I am piecing together
of the great love
I want to think
I'd give anything to find
has no sex, or at least
nothing that isn't me
sitting somewhere alone
playing in my head
the barely soft-core scenes
TV can show these days.

I want a narrative 
that puts the hero's dick in me
in all the ways you've said I am,
since you found your god,
a disgrace even to desire.
You used to do them very well,
or let me do them very well to you,
and half the fun
was watching pleasure
play across your face
and peel away the layers
of who you thought you had to be
to be respected. I 
respected you for that.

Now it's nakedness you fear the most,
and hell, and so
another headline,
"I Am Going To Burn,"
catches my attention.
A woman from Iran explains:
After my father died,
my uncle took us in,
but when he saw me 
wearing in the marketplace
the day after we arrived
the colorful coat
my new friend let me borrow
when she asked me to go with her
to buy some meat for the dinner
her mother was cooking
because that night
both sets of grandparents
were coming to visit, and he saw too
how the coat drew men's eyes to me,
he waited till he'd eaten
his own dinner, 
chewing each mouthful
of lamb and rice
as if he wanted
the end of the meal
never to come,
and then he reached across the table 
and dragged me by the hair
into the next room.
"Two days!" he screamed,
his open hand a slab
of stone back and forth
across my face.
"Two days is all it took!"
He turned to his wife,
"I told you our name
would mean nothing to her."

She, thank God, pulled him off me,
pushed him into their bedroom,
her voice low, soothing, her eyes 
begging me to run, which I did,
to the police, who said I was too young
to press charges on my own,
and then to the park,
where I called the woman
who helped with my mother
when my father brought her home to die.
She asked where I was
and of course I told her.

I sat five hours waiting for her 
on the bench where my uncle found me
when he drove up after dark.
He twisted me by the arm
into the back seat,
drove to his shop
and hung me by my feet
from the hook he used
to hang slaughtered lambs.
He whipped me into a darkness I welcomed
till I came to
with a noose around my neck
and him trying to hold straight
the branch he'd thrown the rope over
so my feet wouldn't touch the ground.
"I'm dying," I said.
"Good!" he answered. "Die!"
A light shone from somewhere,
and he ran. My weight
broke the branch, 
and I walked until I found
a grassy spot
hidden behind some rocks
where I could sleep.

I woke knowing what to do,
stood on the street
till the first car stopped
and for cash I called "busfare home"
did what the man wanted. After him,
a guy on a motorcycle, 
then a man on foot,
done with his day at the bookstore,
who asked if I'd have dinner with him first
in a small back-alley restaurant
I understood at once
was where women like me
bring those men willing to pay a little more.
From then on, all that mattered
was finding the kind of man
who wanted it to feel like a date.

Slowly I figured out
how much to charge
and hid my cash
behind a loose brick
under a bridge
until I had enough
for my own place. No,
I won't tell you where it is,
but look at my eyes:
My uncle says the first time he saw them -
I was an infant in his arms-
he knew they were the eyes of a whore.
 

•
 

I finish reading
and it's Sam's face I see,
the night she finally confessed
the older man she'd sworn
was taking her to Cagliari
to marry her in fact
was paying her a hundred bucks
each time they fucked. The trip -
she'd known this all along -
was one he made each year
with friends he said
he wanted her "to meet." 
I don't know how not to go,
she whispered at the bar
that night at the Limelight,
but then the two of you 
came back from smoking pot,
and she hung all over him
as he pulled her
towards the "private rooms,"
slipping some cash
to the over-muscled bouncer
standing guard. She called
to say goodbye a few weeks later,
and I like to think it wasn't fear
but hope I heard inflected in her words
when she twice refused to tell me
where she was going. When I miss her
I console myself by thinking
she is free of him, and free as well
of why she took that first downpayment
men always think a woman will accept
if she can be persuaded it means love.

In Seoul, another of your papers says,
nine former prostitutes 
have asked the courts 
for a billion won judgment
to cover wages they are owed
and to compensate their suffering 
the men who came into them
day after day, night after night,
leaving what men leave
when they're done using
what they think is there
for them to use, what you
have left in me
despite the fact
I know you didn't mean to.
And I'm thinking now
about the women here,
in this country, feeding kids
or habits they can't kick,
and even the women who say
they choose to prostitute themselves,
and I want to ask them how
they do not sometimes
kill a customer, leaving him
fully clothed but marked
where it would say to other men, 
Be careful how you use us.
We are not weak, and we too
know how to make it hurt.

Or maybe they do.
Maybe somewhere
a list is growing
of unsolved murders,
and there's a detective -
in the movie,
it would have to be a woman,
just to prove not all women
want to murder men
and one at least
would risk her life
to save the guy who's next -
and she's starting
to piece the small mistakes
killers always leave behind
into that nagging hunch
that tugs her sometimes
out of bed for tea -
she's a health conscious
TV woman cop -
and the only person she can think to tell
is the friend you forced me
to disinvite to our wedding. You didn't like
the story he told that day we all had lunch
because I wanted you to meet him.

Remember? About the woman
in the song-in disco
who curled naked in his lap,
kissed him as she filled his soju glass 
and inched her thighs open
just enough to fit his hand
against her cunt?
You left the table
when he said that word
and so you didn't hear the rest:
She took a flower from the centerpiece,
a rose, and as she stood
to join the men
waiting in the shadow
of the stage, one of them
holding the transparent robe
she'd danced in,
she tucked the red blossom
between my friend's shirt and skin,
nicking him just above his nipple
with the one thorn
the florist hadn't trimmed away.
When the stem was all that remained,
he buried that rose
in the long garden
lining the path
from his building to the street.
I wanted to make sure
the rats that swarmed
the trash room each morning
didn't get it. When I asked him why,
he told me this:
                       Two of the girls
pretended to be sisters - this was here,
in the States, not far
from where you lived in Flushing
when you were a kid-
and they sat close on either side of me,
taking turns turning my head 
toward the manufactured love
I knew they filled their eyes with
for at least one man each night,
as if I really might
choose between them.
Then the one who'd said
she was a singer in Taiwan
asked if I would play some blues
on the baby grand piano
sitting silent in the lobby
where three men huddled tensely
over a game of cards.
One, she explained as she took my hand,
a regular they wanted to protect,
was too drunk to think straight
and too proud to fold
the losing hand
he was about to bet
his brand new Mercedes on.
"Something slow," she said, "in G minor."

I sat down, and for twenty minutes
that could've been a set
we'd been playing for twenty years,
she stepped outside her role
as a woman paid to be,
for this one evening
of celebrating the end
of my friend's search for a wife,
the woman of my dreams,
and she became my partner
in a dream I'd given up on
made real. After the applause,
after the free drink
the madame insisted
on buying me, my 
collaborator leaned in
close enough to touch
but didn't. That's
the thing you need to know:
she didn't touch me,
not then, not after
we'd returned to where our party was
and they turned the lights down
for the last hour
even lower than they'd been. She leaned in
and spoke so only I could hear,
"I wish I could be 
the piano you play next."
I wanted then nothing more
than a time and place
to place the blossoms her words became in me
into her hand, and with my hands
to coax from her the music
she wanted me to make.

I'm not defending anything,
but what that woman
wanted me to have of her
was not the part she parcels out
to the men who pay.
It was something whole,
beyond price, and so how,
precisely because each inch of her
has been marked up
to what the market will bear,
how should I refuse to honor
what she would have given me
if I'd been willing to accept it?
 

•
 

You and I made love that night,
and it was good, but then you asked
if I wasn't disappointed
my friend hadn't joined us.
But we didn't ask him, I smiled.
Besides, he's really not my type,
which I knew was what you wanted me to say.
But then I couldn't help myself, Is he yours?
I don't know where you went when you stormed out,
but I was glad to lay in bed alone
thinking back to the beach
that week just after our wedding
and the woman you were mortified
to be caught staring at:
Flesh that barely bounced, muscles
metal smooth under butterscotch skin
even I could feel myself
wanting to lick; blond
in a black bathing suit
you could wear as a necklace -
how could you not have looked at her?
And I remember thinking: Suppose
you swam with her. Suppose,
still loving me, you came
to love her. Could I live with that?
Could you? Could she?
It's not that I think
love does not entail commitment,
but that I wonder what commitment is,
and why these days I can't tell it apart
from the ownership you say
your god commands - his of you;
yours of me - though you of course
prefer to call it something else. 

I lied before: There is another man,
and I want to know
what knowing him will mean.
You will think
I'm asking for permission.
I'm not. I'm wondering
if you have felt
in another woman's walk,
or the way she tilts her head
when she thinks hard before speaking,
or even the hint
of her waist-length hair
through the fabric of your shirt
when she steps quickly past your desk
to use the office's one working fax machine-
I'm wondering if you have felt
the pull of something 
wanting in you
to follow her, something
nothing in me
can hope to stir,
and it saddens you
because you love me;

but then one day 
she asks for your advice,
a closed-door conversation,
and since your cubicle
has no door to close,
it's coffee after work
and then a bite to eat - you call
to tell me you'll be late - and she's smart,
and funny, and what,
you ask yourself, is wrong
with flirting? Still,
you'll say that it was Tom
you went to dinner with,
and so the lying starts,
and pretty soon you get so good
you're spending nights away from home
on "work" you can't refuse
to stay late to finish,
and you'd rather take
the cheap motel room
your "boss" offers you
than drive home at 2 AM
to turn around at six
to head back to work.

I - in the movies
it's always like this -
suspect nothing,
but as she becomes more real for you, 
no, as what you need from her
becomes what you imagine
you can never get from me-
and all because you can't conceive
that I might choose to celebrate
your pleasure in a woman's hunger
other than my own - the part of you
that my desire feeds
withers, like my father did
the year I lived with him
because I was all he had,
and no one - I thought so then;
I think so now-no one
deserves to die alone.
Before he went,
I fed him daily,
spooned the soup
that was all he'd take as nourishment
into the mouth I called a sewer pit
when I was young, but it did no good.
His doctors said he'd lost the will to live.

How long have we
been dying to each other?
It is the other half of what you mean
when you thank your god
that you've been born again,
isn't it? That you feel with me
no better than a living corpse?
That because the he you pray to
says you must endure this death,
you see our marriage
as the birth pangs
of a new, untainted life? I've tried
to understand; I really have. Please know
I'm glad you've found this happiness
and I hope you're right that heaven waits
to welcome you on your appointed day
(and that you get the heaven you deserve),
but if you're reading this
it means I'm gone. Cliché, I know,
just like the video
my movie hero finds -
remember him? -
in a safe deposit box
he got the key to
in yesterday's mail.
The people on the screen
are the parents he never met
telling him how much they loved him
and where can find proof of that. He goes,
but all he'll say when he comes back
is that the proof was there. What he won't tell
hangs between us, a murdered thing that rots, 
spreading a stench through our lives
my story's happy ending can't escape.
This, I want to say, is what you've done to me,
but I can't. I should have left you years ago.
 
 
 

Author's Note
The magazine articles the speaker of this poem talks about can be found in the following publications:
* The man cleared of rape charges: "Flaws in Chemist's Findings Free Man at Center of Inquiry," The New York Times, May 8, 2001
* Korean Sex Workers: "South Korea: Sex Workers Demand Justice," World Press Review, March 2004-11-28
* The verbs of Boro: "The Verbs of Boro," Harper's Magazine,September 2002
* Shashir's suffering: "Silence=Rape," The Nation, March 8, 2004-11-28
* The Iranian prostitute's story is adapted from: "I Am Going To Burn," Harper's Magazine, March 2004
* I first saw the picture of the dead woman with a sword in her vagina in Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking.