SACRAMENT

That win­ter, I prac­ticed say­ing good­bye to you slid­ing a fin­ger inside myself
Plac­ing it—knuckle crease to fingertip—down the cen­ter of my tongue.

I want­ed to know myself—know the woman you might have known. Not sweet
As I would have liked. A chem­i­cal qual­i­ty I might have asked you about, later.

That room with stage props, the giant card­board dice stacked against dark panes—
Why didn’t you touch me then, talk­ing of sur­ro­ga­cy, your for­mer wife?

I would have, had you asked. No effort to imag­ine knees inside me, curled,
Thin eye­lids, retic­u­late ears—I’d done it before, four times before—

I mean my body knows its way. I almost believed we might have conjured
A child with our talk­ing, and our silences, as if con­cep­tion were in rhythm alone. I wept

When I saw bright drops in water, open­ing slow­ly, an egg in there, somewhere,
Half the one we might have made—Winter. Sum­mon­ing your invis­i­ble, wait­ing tongue.

THE ADULTRESS

I asked to meet with your wife
in per­son, you who pro­tect­ed her
from me—me, moth­er of four,

ruined breasts in a push-up bra.
I looked at her, and looking,
want­ed to expose myself, took off

red nylon out­er shell in the cold.
Took off more, down to my
long-sleeved Hen­ley so my flat

bel­ly showed—hers bulging over
belt—and if you hadn’t been
sit­ting there I might not have stopped

with trou­ble­some zip­per, with bra,
shown stretch marks, blue-forked
veins bright with electricity—

ELEVEN TRANSLATIONS OF THE WORD DEPARTURE

1.

Start with Penn Station.
I’d planned to wear jeans, a tas­seled wool scarf.
Low-heeled boots to stay under your 5’9”.

(our bod­ies, how they line up, how they would –)

Beg­gars in the food court and
your phone to your ear.
You keep it there even after you see me,
my voice in both of your ears
as we press togeth­er — (every­thing,
insteps, shins, shoul­ders, pressing)

2.

There’s some­thing more – or different.
We walk, your head a dark blur
along the curved tile wall.

(against you)

We look for a train, any train – so long
as the car is empty.

3.

For four years I’ve wondered:
Would I have been the kind of woman
who said, let’s grab a bite first –
ordered soup so hot the skin would curl
from the roof of my mouth?
The kind of woman who refused
your tongue, later?

4.

Go back to the beginning.
Sum­mer in Maine, the emp­ty room, luggage.
The kiss on my forehead.
Then you came back – remem­ber? Asked me
to turn in your keys, your hands
steady. The last time we touched,
your fin­ger­tips quiv­er­ing between
thorns on a stem.

5.

Penn Sta­tion, Feb­ru­ary. For­get the train.
Pull you into a filthy stall,
take you out of the slit in your shorts –
don’t touch, don’t – hold it to my cheek.
Beg me to say the words
I’d typed instead of my lips, tongue.

6.

Tell me the most lov­ing thing,
you wrote. I’m lying beside you on a mountain,
I wrote back. Tak­ing the mountain
inside me – us.

7.

Now the emp­ty car. Seats too wide for one,
too nar­row for two. Noth­ing here
but the strad­dle, knees bump­ing armrests,
gray whiskers chaf­ing my chest.

8.

Flaubert’s Acrop­o­lis – a come-down!
Like meet­ing some­one you only imagined.

Or maybe it’s all translation.
Lewis says a trans­la­tor must be chaste, like a nun
dri­ving whores to buy clean needles.

9.

Tell me you’ll be there, you said.

10.

Some­where between keys and fingertips
you asked me to tell you how things
would be with us.

And where are we in all of this, you said.

I want you to rewrite this, you said.
I want you to change every pronoun.

11.

How would things be with us? he asked.
I would do things dif­fer­ent­ly, I said,
not know­ing what I meant.

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Jamie Quatro’s debut sto­ry col­lec­tion, I Want To Show You More, is forth­com­ing in 2013 from Grove/Atlantic. Her work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in The Keny­on Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The South­ern Review, McSweeney’s, Oxford Amer­i­can, and else­where. She is the recip­i­ent of fel­low­ships from Yad­do and the Mac­Dow­ell Colony, and was the Bor­chardt Schol­ar at the 2011 Sewa­nee Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence. She holds grad­u­ate degrees from the Col­lege of William and Mary and the Ben­ning­ton Col­lege Writ­ing Sem­i­nars, and lives with
her hus­band and chil­dren in Look­out Moun­tain, Georgia.