Vox Populi
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Corrine Clegg Hales: Her Husband Wants Her Back
Marge has run again, hiding out
at one neon motel after another
with her three small children. I stay
with the babies at night while she
serves drinks in a short skirt
for tips. It’s 1961, I’m almost 12,
she pays me what she can. At this motel
I watch cartoons with the kids, I tell them
long, made-up stories, I feed them
peanut butter and white sugar sandwiches,
canned milk and water, and we make hats
and boats and paper dolls out of newspapers
swiped from the motel office. Usually
it’s only a few days before Marge’s husband
shows up with grocery store flowers, or a fist full
of poker winnings, or a loaded gun, or a quick
backhand to the side of her face. He always
wants her back. This time it’s been
a month. She’s tried to file
a restraining order, but the police want
photos. The police want bruises,
black eyes–they want a picture
of the ragged bullet hole that stares out
from the yellow kitchen wall. Marge has
no camera, no money, no film. The police want
emergency room, the police want x-rays, they want
broken bones. Most nights she comes back
to the motel at 2 or 3 a.m., exhausted, apron
pockets nearly empty. But sometimes
on a weekend, that string-tied
apron is bursting—loaded with nickels,
dimes, half dollars, and she dumps it all
on the checkered linoleum floor
where we stack coins, calling out:
Enough for chicken dinner! Enough
for steak dinner! Enough for sweet smelling
shampoo! Enough for new shoes! Enough
to buy a car! Enough for a trip
to Disneyland! Some nights she brings back
a pizza for tomorrow’s breakfast. Some nights
she walks through the door loud and happy
with a bucket of fried chicken and wakes
the kids. She turns on the radio and we sit
cross-legged on the floor eating, singing,
laughing by lamp light in the middle
of the night, and I am so happy there
in that motel, the bright moon seeping in
between the curtains–I believe this
could be home. So, when she asks me
to skip school one day so she can see
a doctor, I say sure. Later,
after her shift, she pours herself
a full cup of whiskey and sinks
into a pillow on the floor. I’m pregnant,
she says, as if telling me
she has cancer–or has committed
some type of terrible crime. I start to say
it’s okay—it’s good—I can help. No, honey
she says. I’m done. I’ll lose my job
the second I start to show. I have to go
back now. She looks at the three
small bodies, sleeping happily
in a soft humming heap
on the bed. There’s no choice,
she tells me. You’ll see.
Copyright 2023 Corrine Clegg Hales
Corrine Clegg Hales’s books include To Make It Right, winner of the 2011 Autumn House Poetry Prize judged by Claudia Emerson.
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Love it!
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Wonderful poem! Thankyou
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Thanks, Sean.
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❤️💔
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So vivid and devastating.
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It really is. You’ve chosen the right adjectives to describe the poem.
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The police want bruises, black eyes– they want a picture… Devastating poem, with inklings of light that won’t stay for long. Visceral imagery, very moving.
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Thanks, Clayton. I agree.
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Deeply moving verse that uplifts my spirit with all the miseries around.
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Thanks for sharing, Jamal.
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So much said in the spaces between the words. Heartbreak and happiness, the sense of frustration of no way out. “He always wants her back.” It took my breath away.
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The title of the poems sounds romantic at first, but after we’ve read the poem, the title becomes scary.
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Thank you
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What a poem — how important such poems are to bear witness, to speak for those you are too afraid to, or just simply cannot. Beautiful, heartbreaking, immensely important… Thank you Corrrine, thank you Mike.
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Unfortunately, most of us have known women in this situation, having to grab their children and make a run for it. Corrine captures the experience beautifully.
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Once again, a short and attractive story presented in the form of a poem by breaking the lines.
James Tate in his Introduction to The Best American Poetry, 1997 says:
“Why is it that you can’t just take some well-written prose, divide it into lines, and call it poetry? (Thank you for asking that question, you jerk.) While most prose is a kind of continuous chatter, describing, naming, explaining, poetry speaks against an essential backdrop of silence. It is almost reluctant to speak at all, knowing that it can never fully name what is at the heart of its intention. There is a prayerful, haunted silence between words, between phrases, between images, ideas and lines.
This is one reason why good poems can be read over and over. The reader, perhaps without knowing it, instinctively desires to peer between the cracks into the other world where the unspoken rests in darkness.”
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Farideh, thanks for quoting Jim Tate, an iconic poet in America.
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