Poetry by Charlotte Ungar

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Hemophilia


There is an alternate painting of Venus that bleeds in the way little girls leak.


I stood in the Met watching her naked body. Spread in the white room, grayed fathers eased beside me, their callous knuckles soft along sloped shoulders of even softer daughters. 


We turn to the ruptured goddess hung, sweet with swan skin and open at the stomach. A birth of a woman knowing no cocooning shell or divine cloth to blanket the bareness. Red by her water, 


Vultures pry battered rabbit meat, staining her pearled, provoked body in a bloody wash—and I thought, the torn carcasses of woodland animals are of her, and she is of them, and they 


Remind me of the twelve-year-old shuffling, still in her mother’s clothes. When we are coated in purity, of protected things—quiet in the ugly natural order. I wanted to make her strong, tell 


Her who would take it all. Of the eager men dragging. Of the rooms of splotched politicians thieving our blessings. Of my own father, who said the


Overturning of Roe V. Wade is what this country needs. How to stare into a wounded thing of the past and forever. 


You will never love me as I have loved myself.

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For My Mother


It is not in my nature now to sleep belly-up 
nuzzled by the warmth of your legs, times
when dark bedrooms, their black palettes 
whirling, tweaked my brain to forge horror
and you, lay reading books of young girls 
crossing kingdoms, snow-horned beasts
by their side—do I remind you 
of the frayed patients assigned to your cases,
troubled social work in the city, as you tread
into my twenty-year-old bed 
touching my back, now
laying on piles of silent I love yous, now
I am sorry your hands have felt more of me
than mine of you.

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Candy
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That night we drove to the only parking lot in Connecticut with blue lights, a Wholefoods had ordered the wrong bulbs, spreading iridescence over their concrete. A girl in my front seat huddles, her head shaved for the first time, murmuring I don’t feel pretty. She had been the type of beautiful to keep a town excited. Buzzed off her hair in our college dorm room, sticking safety pins through her nose. In the cool fluoride blue I watched her remind me. Tell me of the drugs she could buy walking in each direction. Tell me what she’d like. Tell me of the men on the streets. The patterns of a person that trace onto people. The moment an uncle overstepped. Girlfriends of the past. What a young boy said in AA. I’d like to remember us bedroom dancing to Le Tigre, maybe. Watching her learn to move her body to music, the base of instincts, clean. The blue headscarf draping to her waist the first day of school, thinking, who wears that? But I remember us, here. Eating each other.



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Born and raised in New York, Charlotte Ungar is currently an undergraduate English major concentrating in creative writing at the University of Connecticut.