He Doesn’t Know: A Poem
He brings me cups of cold tea
and kisses the top of my plaited head
as if I were his child and not his wife.
He doesn’t know that I know that he stares
when the wind of the fan whips across my cheeks
and down my arms like a silk shawl
and my eyes close, drinking in the feeling, feeling
each tiny hair blow in the breeze.
My voice is mysterious as I read aloud my writing
and he tries not to listen, tries not to fall in love
with my phrasing and the dumb way I swallow
the ends of my sentences, eating again the words
before I let them escape into the stiff, warm air.
On the night our son was born, he screamed with me,
yelled and shouted in pain with every push. And he took
the pipe of gas and air from me when I was too high
to know who he was or what I was doing or where we were.
He doesn’t know that I know that he smiled
at me, wet in the hospital bed from sweat,
from my waters, from fear.
And when they placed the baby on my chest, its long writhing arms,
its old man’s shriveled head and all of that hair, he doesn’t
know that I know that he wept and fell in love me with again.
Anyonita is a bi, poly American in Britain. She writes with a confessionalist voice, exploring narrative essays, pop culture, parenthood, sex, relationships and intimacy, race, travel, literature and food.
