DRAMATIC Monologue Poem: You Made Sure to Never Hit Me, by Tessa Naylor

When the earth opened and swallowed you, I know now I should have left you
to be purified in Lake Michigan waters, baptized by clumps of sand, the tiny pellets
I later tidal combed from your hair, away from you. Like Jupiter, nostalgia beach ate you up
in one gulp, in one flat-bottomed step torn through the edge that beckoned to devour you whole.
You sank quicker than I did in our union, anchored to the turf that tricked visions of security
until your weight was pressed above it, bending to you like I did when you pressed me
to that bed bug bed when I didn’t want to have sex but didn’t know how to deny you
without a fight. I wish I could say I hesitated grasping at you with that twisted driftwood
life jacket, wooden oar, leaving you to swim in Princess Bride, Lightning Sand,
my childhood film favorite we watched the night before.

In up to your shoulders, sinking in soot, mouth gaping like some dead fish, wretched corpse,
or the hollowed out skin of myself, I saved you from any crisis you had and you loved me
the same, screaming, slurring, tongue wagging until I caved. Your pupils always darted around,
akin to an animal trapped, they did then too, when you were descending
the Wisconsin dune restoration divot. If I deserted you to your saccharine lips daring survival,
would you have died half in, half out? Grit under nails, claw marks surrounding you, posed
in my familiar struggle, with the abuse of abandoning me in sliding your limp body
from that crevice, I was condemned to clean up your mess the same as when you weren’t doll-full
of dust, grains taking up residence in the pockets of hunger
from all the meals you refused.

Maybe, your mistress would have still confessed to all the ways you filled her
while you finger-ripped my soul away from its vessel by each pink, thready tendon.
Would I have also died? Forever in love, buried in your pocket next to your keys and the phone
that you whipped across the dew bitten lawn while hollering something atrocious,
with its holes that I prodded an unspooled paperclip inside to pull out each trace.

You made sure to never hit me,

but you always got too close, like a dog waiting to snap
its foamy jowls, clicking your broken enamel pained jaw until I surrendered
to some everlasting tug of war— familiar hands clasped around that branch,
the same ones that circled my neck while you orgasmed runny and thin,
slipping to safety with a sigh of release, but I couldn’t heave you from the pocket of ground.
Leaving you to dig ten deep lesions in gluttonous grit, mimicking the addiction you granted me,
the Newport crystals in your teeth that dully glimmered when you wailed for my hault of help.

I never knew I’d someday relish in realizing you cornered, astray in your power
of being too lucky, grabbing at the soil beneath you in the a rough way you treated me with,
not in the skilled way that made you shiver when I butterflied my nails along your back,
hauling yourself out of the pit that satisfied my guilted craving of finally being rid of you.
Craving the deposit to hungrily suck you through its straw,
to pressure drag you down
with a rip current’s twisting and turning,
as a predator does its prey,

where you’d dance with the hellhounds,
just twenty-two inches away
from digested, perpetual banishment,
where the silt would have settled,
righting itself in a clean slate,
as if you had never existed at all,
returning to the unbelievable calm of being lonely,
but this would be just one more thing that would be my fault