Caroline Shea

Betty Draper, After the Divorce

SCENE 1

I’m half-sick of homemaking. Am angel
of the. Am hearth and.
Am despotic sitcom grin,
teeth strung like pearls.
There’s roast fresh from the oven,
rare enough to bloody
your beautiful, biting mouth.
I’m home, honey.
Without me
all you have is a TV set,
bedroom spotlit from above,
three walls framing a life, pink-shelled,
and me buoyed up through static
for your viewing pleasure.
I’m the suburbs’ darling.
I rise at nine and nap at noon.
In the drive in only my housecoat
and curlers, my ankles scandalize

My hopes—those sparrows—flee above me.
I cock the gun and shoot.

SCENE 2

I dream you home
late again, smelling of someone
else’s perfume. It’s lucky you look good
in a suit. In the car, long after you’d left,
Sally says My father’s never given me
anything. We smoke
the whole way home, twin trails
of cursive spinning up from each blond head.
What have you given me?

A thicker skin. My children. The gift of knowing
beauty could never keep you.

SCENE 3

You’d already seen through a crack in the door
what men and women do
to each other in the dark.
There were no surprises
after that. No woman could satisfy you
except while asleep.
Silent and shadowed enough
to be your mother
before that last, great failure: her death
and you left among the living.
Bodies fucking and bodies leaving
like they invented it. As if anything could cut
to the quick. You went looking for a body
to fill your need. Went looking for a body
I couldn’t be. Where the heart is.
There’s no place like. Home
sweet, I’m heartsick. Heartbeat.

Our love a temporary lease.
Admit it— there’s no place like me.

Post-Op Love Poem as Animorph

Tethered
to the heating pad in bed, I say it hurts.
It always hurts, you answer.
A truth and a lie. Yes, there are whole weeks,
lucky seasons, where I notice it less,
this slow erosion. Where it slips below
the surface, a low hum I’ve learned
to live with. Some nights, I struggle
to ignite into desire. I want to thieve
the sweat from your skin. Climb your ribs
like a gym class rope: all the way,
palms burning. It’s my sameness
that bores me. In sleep, I’m transfigured.
Woman as beast. As bird. As haunted house.
Or those tattered paperbacks
in the grocery store aisle, child-faces morphing
into fur and feather, all holograph glint.
The facts of what happened will never be enough.
What if the bone in my shoulder—the one that wings
higher on the right—burst through skin
into flight? What if you undressed me to find
the smooth sweep of scales?
I know how this story ends. I awake
almost entirely the same. The ghost
of a form I once wore stirring in my blood.
When I returned to this body,
I brought something with me. Pain an alien
twin I can’t excise or ignore. You reach for me,
wanting. Each time still
a surprise.