Rachel Custer: “Woman”
WOMAN
The way a charming man can ride his violence
to any height, I decide to speak the truth
is worth all the long years I kept my silence
like a right I wasn’t sure I even wanted.
(Like a rite my body tried to stop performing.)
The way a man can ride a lie (so flaunted!)
to truth inside another woman’s need.
(I couldn’t be the truth inside his lie.)
Truth became in me a kind of greed
leaving me gasping after it, like air.
(Your mouth, pressed to mine, only sought
instead of giving.) I breathed in fear
your lie would choke the flower of truth I knew.
And every garden I planted would grow for you.
Rachel Custer is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. She is the author of God’s Country (Terrapin Books, forthcoming) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, American Journal of Poetry, Antigonish Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (OJAL), among others.