Your wife has always been foreign to you.
She sleeps with her back to the wall,
practices strange tongues in her sleep.

After that night she crawled into a cab
you couldn’t bring yourself to say it
was her fault, you are the victim here.

Two ribs and her wrist were fractured.
Your are jobless these days. The tequila
under the sofa cushion made you do it.

She has taken up with cash registers.
Sometimes you follow her to work, watch
her smile through the shop window.

You dread the sound of Creole in dreams
where a python coils asphyxia around
your body under the orange tree.

Recurrent as your thirst for liquor;
some days you are blue upon waking.
A baseball bat helps release steam.

Your break the lock on her closet now.
A doll of moss and twigs peeks
from the space between her hung dresses.

It is clothed with strips from the plaid
shirt she claims to have burnt with
the iron. You blacked her eye for that.

Voodoo slashes your mind. Later she finds
you castrated by fear in the basement,
lays a comforting arm around your shoulders.