Lothar’s Wife

By Colleen J. McElroy b. 1935

he’s only a smart-ass when he’s home

with Mandrake

he’s silent and obedient as a snail

his bald pate bowing into the cape’s

trail and dreaming

of tales he’ll bore me with

his one night home

once a month

that’s what I get like clockwork

and always on the full moon

half my allowance he reserves

for sheets, tearing them with his teeth

to vent the forced silence

of those other twenty-odd days

did I say odd

it’s that one day that’s odd

his coming home full of half-tricks

he’s picked up from the master

the hypnotic hunger

he so willingly tries on me

he claims he stole me, bought me

claims he’s Zulu, Bantu, Beja

depending on the hour, day, or year

says I was the black spot

in the white of his eye

the speck he turned into leopard

that unwittingly turned into woman

neither of us no longer knows what’s real

and my mother beats her fat tongue

against her gums

as each month I try to reveal the puzzle

stroking the lines from his hairless

obsidian crown

I hear her rumbling around in the next room

I soothe his sweet head and she moans

heaven protect us from all the things

to which we can become accustomed

Colleen J. McElroy, “Lothar’s Wife” from What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1988. Copyright © 1990 by Colleen J. McElroy and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems 1968-1988 (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)

Biography

Colleen McElroy was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a military family that moved often. She earned a PhD in ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions from the University of Washington. McElroy has written short stories, plays, television scripts, and nonfiction; her collections of poetry include Winters without Snow (1979); Queen of the Ebony Isles (1984), winner of the American Book Award from the . . .

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