Homewrecker You’d have to understand the home as a unified construct, as a guarded entity, locked up like a bank vault, a virgin, or like a rarified set of collectible dolls with no inherent value but worth agreed upon. You’d have to really buy into that, the quality of the dolls’ cornsilk hair, or wee fingernails painted with real polish, the hardscrabble factory in Minnesota where Slovenian immigrants hand-sewed their 100% cotton gowns half a century before your husband was born. You’d need to assume that a man could be as pliant as one of these plastic, factory-built objects, his limbs grooved to only move certain ways, careful turning the head as it’s liable to snap off with enough hard twisting. Do you, personally, know a particular man like this, a vessel, or will any man do whose attention turns lightly on a thick, nearby thumb, are you lucky to seize such an empty wisp of a man, to grip tight to that vacancy and hold fast, you good girl?
Proof of impossibility A room with furniture removed is still a room It has its own particular room-ness not least of all this expanse to move through It took me so long to get here to let my skin protect me and stop responding to refuse finally to give in or push back Even as a girl above me hovered an idea of use my body an equation to all alike An embarrassing number touched me but I see now how few have loved me only considered me curious the way I loved others a riddle a source of jealousy or suspicion a fang The anger of men I can almost forgive but in some circles the women screamed their lizard fury Earlier in my reckoning I would allow that jaggedness to fill me but my body is no longer porous I am no longer what I once was his friend a term as antiquated as its corresponding dear as with written confidences Dear Sir or Dear Madam so close to darling and so far Half-morsel the only word for us though at times it was refuge
From the Author: Together “Homewrecker” and “Proof of impossibility” do more work to disrupt distinctions between romance and friendship than either could on its own. These poems also have a backstory: I was harassed online for about 18 months by someone calling me a homewrecker and husband-stealer. At first, this seemed painfully absurd, as I’m an aromantic, mostly asexual person. But my close friendships have always been difficult to appreciate without using language like queerplatonic, a word and concept that most people don’t know or understand. In mathematics, a proof of impossibility demonstrates that a problem can’t be solved at all, or can’t be solved as described – which is how I like to think of knowledge, as a matter of shifting signifiers. The “friend” of that poem is a fictionalized stand-in for several different people, and also a nod to the master of Emily Dickinson’s unsent letters. I don’t intend to speak to people I’ve known in the past—those involved don’t need to be told what our connections entailed—but to assert the true parameters, thus the legibility, of this form of intimacy.
Erin Hoover is the author of Barnburner, winner of Elixir Press’s Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award in Poetry. New poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, the Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and other journals. Hoover teaches poetry as an Assistant Professor at Tennessee Tech University.
