Jack Kerouac, Letter to his first wife, Edie, 1957

"It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing."

 ~ Jack Kerouac, Letter to his first wife, Edie, 1957

"Sweetness" by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

 ~ Stephen Dunn, "Sweetness"

Let’s just get this out in the open. From Homewrecker, Daphne Gottlieb

I was 14 and madly in love for the first time. He was 21. He made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street. A serious girl. A girl his age. A girl he loved. Unlike inappropriate, high school, secret me.

The next time, I was 15 visiting a friend at college. It was a friend’s friend’s boyfriend who looked like Jim Morrison and wore leather pants and burned candles and incense. She was at work and I wanted him to touch me. She found out. I don’t know what happened after that.

I was 19 and he was my boyfriend’s archrival. I was 20 and it was my lover’s girlfriend and we had to lie because otherwise he always wanted to watch. I was 24 and her girlfriend knew about it but then changed her mind about the open relationship. We saw each other anyway. I was 30 and we wanted each other but were committed to other people; the way we look at each other still scorches the walls. I turned thirty-something and pointedly wasn’t invited to a funeral/ a wedding/ a baby shower because of a rumor.

I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable, not again, not with this one. That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice – not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. [cliché]That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love – at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love – does not conquer all.

Arrow, meet heart. Apple, meet Eve.

It’s an old story. It’s one that we find endlessly fascinating and can’t stop telling, from the headlines to Jerry Springer, from politics to pornography. But if these conversations are happening out there in the movies, television and news media, they only occur only in the quietest and most painful ways in our own homes. And there’s no doubt these conversations are happening. A recent statistic in a Dan Savage column cited infidelity as high as eighty percent in all couples. Perhaps it’s true in the public perception that, as a close straight single male friend said, “Monogamy is what you can get away with.” But if there are so many people straying outside the lines, maybe it’s time to examine how we really love – maybe then we’d be able to talk about adultery without snickering, whispering or screaming.

Shortly after Homewrecker’s call for submissions was sent out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. They weren’t submissions. Over and over, they said: You’re not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill, and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal, or perform. Here’s to the possibility to an end to infidelity, of having love without lies. As a writer, I’m drawn to contradiction and cataclysm, compelled by ambivalent, tortured emotional states. As a feminist, I’m appalled that most of the acculturated stories we have about adultery end with the betraying, sinister woman being punished/cast out while adulterous men come back, transformed, renewed, rescued. As an American queer, I’m on the outside of the primary happily-ever-after story we tell about Love, and over and over, I’m struck by how hard-won and rare living out this myth is – for anyone.

Here then, I hope, are stories, poems and essays about the way it really breaks down, about what desire does to us, , about what happens when we’re incandescent but are not allowed to be, about what we look like when we adore, and, in the end, what it cost.

 

~ "Let's just get this out in the open," Homewrecker, Daphne Gottlieb

"Postscript" by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

 ~ Seamus Heaney, "Postscript"

Richard Siken, "Boot Theory"

A man walks into a bar and says:
                                                Take my wife–please.
                                       
                                            So you do.
            You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her
                                                and she leaves you and you’re desolate.
You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man
                        on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains
                                                                                                on the ceiling.
                  And you can hear the man in the apartment above you
                                    taking off his shoes.
You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,
                                                                                    you’re waiting
            because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be
                        some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together
                  but here we are in the weeds again,
                                                                                         here we are
in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.
                        And then the second boot falls.
                                                            And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.
            A man walks into a bar and says:
                                                Take my wife–please.
                                                                        But you take him instead.
You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,
            and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you
                                                                              and he keeps kicking you.
            You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.
                        Boots continue to fall to the floor
                                                                        in the apartment above you.
You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.
            Your co-workers ask
                                    if everything’s okay and you tell them
                                                                                    you’re just tired.
            And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.
A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
                                    Make it a double.
            A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
                                                                                 Walk a mile in my shoes.
A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:
                                    I only wanted something simple, something generic…
            But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                        but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                      but then he’s still left with his hands.

 ~ Richard Siken, "Boot Theory"

Matthew Dickman, "All-American Poem"

Still, tiger, there’s no reason
not to tie your wife up
if that’s what she’s been dreaming about
in traffic. No reason not to
go out and eat twenty doughnuts
if that’s what you want instead of granola
because, whether you like it or not,
it’s a skeleton you’re wearing
under those Italian jeans. For my part
I’m going to watch hours of television
wearing nothing but a pair of running shoes.
I’m going to walk out
into the yard and begin courting
the rosebushes. I’m not going to
let a little thing like the world stand in my way.
Why should I? I understand it
as much as I understand penguins
and I still go to the zoo. I still watch them
swimming underwater.
It’s like watching really beautiful gods
moving within a universe
that other, taller gods built for them
out of compassion and ingenuity.
It would be easy to sit at the bar smoking,
drinking, ruminating about the why of penguins,
pulling our hair out, crying into our gin
about how the penguins have forsaken us,
how nature is having another party
and we’re not invited.
I like the world in all its incredible forms.
When I’ve had the shit beat out of me, my friends
who have died their violent and accidental
deaths, falling from windows, swerving
into the lights of traffic, my suffering,
my unearned joy, my hand reaching up
through the yards of fabric that made your dress,
the midnight movies, all the kids huffing
all the paint thinners, the comedy
of the poor and the ruthlessness
of the rich, how we’re too hungry to fight,
too crushed by debt and the psycho
promise of there’s-always-tomorrow,
of rent-to-own, the smell
of carrots, the smell of gasoline, the mysteries
of bread and wine, the sky
in Montana with Laura beneath it,
the sky in Portland when my brother was buried
in his little tin of ash, the happiness
of love and the pity of sex, the bathroom stalls,
the fruit markets, Rob proposing on one knee
wearing a panda costume, sweating inside
the fake fur, his bride in love,
the quarterback’s son
paralyzed from the neck down
and then gone, the fear and fetish
of genitals, the way
we beat our selves into our suits and high heels.
I see how we are with each other.
I see how we act. It’s not the world
with its ten-zillion things we should be grasping,
but the sincerity of penguins, the mess we made of the roses.

 ~ "All-American Poem," Matthew Dickman

Sierra DeMulder, "Unrequited Love Poem"

You will be out with friends
when the news of her existence
will be accidentally spilled all over
your bar stool. Respond calmly
as if it was only a change in weather,
a punch line you saw coming.
After your fourth shot of cheap liquor,
leave the image of him kissing another woman
in the toilet.

In the morning, her name will be
in every headline: car crash, robbery, flood.
When he calls you, ignore the hundreds of ropes
untangling themselves in your stomach.
You are the best friend again. He invites
you over for dinner and you say yes
too easily. Remind yourself this isn’t special,
it’s only dinner, everyone has to eat.
When he greets you at the door, do not think
for one second you are the reason
he wore cologne tonight.

In his kitchen, he will hand-feed you
a piece of red pepper. His laugh
will be low and warm and it will make you
feel like candlelight. Do not think this is special.
Do not count on your fingers the number
of freckles you could kiss too easily.
Try to think of pilot lights and olive oil,
not everything you have ever loved about him,
or it will suddenly feel boiling and possible
and so close. You will find her bobby pins
laying innocently on his bathroom sink.
Her bobby pins. They look like the wiry legs
of spiders, splinters of her undressing
in his bed. Do not say anything.
Think of stealing them, wearing them
home in your hair. When he hugs you goodbye,
let him kiss you on the forehead.
Settle for target practice.

At home, you will picture her across town
pressing her fingers into his back
like wet cement. You will wonder
if she looks like you, if you are two bedrooms
in the same house. Did he fall for her features
like rearranged furniture? When he kisses her,
does she taste like wet paint?

You will want to call him.
You will go as far as holding the phone
in your hand, imagine telling him
unimaginable things like you are always
ticking inside of me and I dream of you
more often than I don’t.
My body is a dead language
and you pronounce
each word perfectly.

Do not call him.
Fall asleep to the hum of the VCR.
She must make him happy.
She must be
She must be his favorite place in Minneapolis.
You are a souvenir shop, where he goes
to remember how much people miss him
when he is gone.

 ~ Sierra DeMulder, "Unrequited Love Poem"