Amanda Gaines

AFTER ANOTHER BREAKUP, I PLAY STEVIE WONDER’S “AS” & DRIVE THROUGH OKLAHOMA THINKING HOW ALL THE LAKES ARE MAN MADE

Just once, I’d like to step into something that could drown me
without worrying about dying. Okay, so
I’m not really talking about lakes, here. Okay, so I knew
as soon as he punched that window while I stood behind it
that he wanted to hurt me & I would never leave him.
Okay, so when Stevie croons her acceptance is the way we pay,
isn’t he making love a woman who asks no questions?
Fried chicken smoke & summer heat slide like wet hands
through my open windows & settle
around my neck. Black grackles sing over what gets left
in an empty parking lot. I count cacti on street corners & pray
that the gospel choir pulsing through my speakers
pulls me out of my pity party, drenched & unforgiving.
When I first moved to Oklahoma, I visited a lake
with a man I met online & let him fuck me
after he taunted me through pitch-dark woods, joking
how wild boars & wolves might devour me.
Now, tearing a half-moon from my thumb at a red light,
I can admit: I helped build the pyre men have placed me on
& still didn’t deserve it.
No, he never actually hit me. But I wonder if Stevie knows the sounds
a girl-throat makes while begging for penance, head held underwater
by a once-beloved? How deep girl-rage goes, past the seeable blue.
This is a rite of passage, getting out without leaving.
This is a timid celebration of unstuck tongues.
This is how the magic happens,
if I want for nothing.

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Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer and Ph.D. candidate in CNF in Oklahoma State University’s creative writing program. Her poetry and nonfiction are published or awaiting publication in Barrelhouse, Willow Springs, Yemassee, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Superstition Review.