Sarah Jones: Dad, This Is How My Relationships with Men Work

Jorge Gonzalez

Fasteners

Dad, this is how my relationships with men work:

Remember that hardware store on Auberry Road?
The one with silver tools—wrenches, pliers, hammers,
screwdrivers—hanging from pegboards along the wall
of that dark back aisle with plastic tubs filled with fasteners—
bolts, nuts, washers— everything you’d need
to keep two things together.

Remember those needle-nose pliers you plucked
from off the wall? How you wrenched my mouth
open with Come on, baby and Don’t be a sissy—
how you yanked that dangling baby tooth
from its socket and blood jumped out like a sob?
Goddamn it, Sarah, you said. You’re bleeding everywhere.

I kept a blank stare, Dad. I covered my mouth. 

Found Poem from The Feminine Mystique

The whole burden of a husband is a wife
saying no—a woman refusing his phantasies.

He’ll look for another face of hostility at dinner parties—
This new woman barbs neighbors in breakfast nooks.

All women are in the same illusion: a usual
curiosity for a secret career.

A wife will suddenly wake up
and see herself again. About moving on:

for a woman, there is always the sense of loss. 

graveyard of a fourteen-year marriage

            One of your socks
ended up at my place.

             There was a hole in the heel
I’d intended to darn.

              I wept in that hole.

Then tossed the sock into a trash bin
              full of fish bones.

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Sarah Jones is a poet and freelance writer from Seattle. She is an MFA student at Antioch University in Los Angeles, studying Poetry. Sarah is an assistant poetry editor of Lunch Ticket, and her work has most recently appeared in The Normal School.