Corey Van Landingham

Reader, I

was one of many, in a long ancestral line, one of thousands of
women to fuse herself to sorrow. From Napoli, from the strict
wooden church of Fürstenberg, his people arrived. From village
syntax of sacrifice. From heavy bread and women. Women who
salted the pot with a baby at the breast. Women who strained
eyes, peeling their faces, each night, reflected in soft potatoes.
Do you think we deserve happiness? He asked this often. I had
been silly, thinking us special. In imagining some swift
departure from women who strapped themselves to their
festering elders without a thought. Even in the closest stone huts
they left room for an altar. I did not realize I was to become one
long cello note, or the short, cold index finger of a German wife.
A heroic washing stone. How he longs for ardor, labors to
lose himself through eleven-hour days at the desk. Stark Lents.
Happiness, ha. So I liked to let bitters fall, from a glass dropper,
into champagne. To take, on occasion, a Wednesday off. He
had this motto: work is love. Coarse penance. Rue. Dark
centuries of women annihilating my morning walk. All his
great-great grannies un-fucking me. So what, my buon
appetito? Are there moments—the shirked hour of grading, the
plucked tulip—that can exist unscathed? What of those early,
giddy nights of dancing in dark clubs? What of Miami’s long
beach, and mai tais? What of picnics? What of my toe slipped
into his mouth?