Poetry by Margaret Diehl

                Tristan Loper CC



AFTERMATH

At twelve, I was crammed so tightly 
my contents fused. 
I feared I wasn’t human
and had my reasons. Alien, Mechanical 
or one of those lumpy bundles
fairies leave in the cradle. 

My mother says, 
               I thought you didn’t like me.
I thought she had flung me
from her orbit like a rat
found among the kittens.

Once singled out
by my dead-by-his-own-hand father 
for my rare-for-a-girl talent
in mathematics, 
I beseeched my soul with logic.

Your parents are human.
Their faces resemble yours.
You bleed from the vagina 
and speak in sentences crafted 
from vintage words you understand.
You’re only mad--

—and saw myself straightjacketed
in a room like an insect’s eye
mouth stopped with white tape
years cawing overhead.

I kept my head down
slowly growing old enough
to hitch a ride on sex
and more sex, concussive nights,
shame greasing the inconspicuous hinges
of my dungeon bracelets.

                              *

My mouth curves in a friendly smile
among the humans. 
I’ve earned a wedding ring
am praised and paid for work 
contributing my efforts
to our fragile lattice of light  
against a darkness many billions 
of years old.

Before I was born
in the spring and early summer heat
of Houston, Texas, 1954,
my mother had a thought.
                You were planned, she says. 
                The others weren’t.

She pulled me from the deeps.
Perhaps her voice with its southern pinks
found the right song.

              Perhaps I was ready to be gone
              from the lightless place, its god and dog.

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Margaret Diehl has published a chapbook of poems it all stayed open (Red Glass Books, 2011), two novels and a memoir (Men, 1989, Me and You, 1990 and The Boy on the Green Bicycle, 1999, all from Soho Press) as well as poems, short stories, and essays in literary journals, including Kestrel, The Chattahoochie Review, Kenyon Review, The American Journal of Poetry, AMP, Cloudbank, The Adirondack Review, and Gargoyle.  She lives in New York City.
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