Marriage felt like a low doorway. I didn’t know how to come
out the other side intact. I lost all sense of dignity, of value. I did not
know who was crying. I wanted children for all the wrong reasons.
I didn’t care that they were wrong, they were reasons. I had so few now
I felt that I must follow them. Human desire knew no boundary.
I was nothing and it was dirty work. Sex as the only relief from bureaucracy,
sex as bureaucracy. Humans as characters who build their own guilt.

The sky was purple with fog. The palms looked like pines before sunrise.
I had three babies, made of sculpted clay. One had a head with a hole
in the top of it. The other two end at the neck. How much
of our relation to the world is authentic and how much
is learned behavior? Am I hurting or am I, in fact, creating that hurt?
Have I ever been gentle? I felt low, so low.