An unmarried Western woman, working overseas—
I often get asked, “Where is your husband?”
“How many babies?” After explaining
one time too many that I’ve never been married,
never had any babies, not really likely to now,
and no, I don’t think I’ve wasted my life,
not all of it anyway (thanks, airport taxi driver),
I find myself lying, saying things like, “I was widowed.
So young. I’m afraid he got taken before we could conceive.”
That usually does the job—the subject gets changed.
Once the driver turned off the meter, my whole fare got waived
sometimes the asker tears up and sometimes ++sometimes
when I tell it just right+ I get tears in my eyes too
and I wonder ++oh I wonder +which one of us deserved them the most
Click here to read Joanna Grant on the origin of the poem.
Image by Brandon Day on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Joanna Grant:
Recently, I’ve become interested in formal poetry and how its seeming constraints can open up worlds of affect and meaning. In my exploration of the sonnet form, the collection The American Sonnet from University of Iowa Press has been an eye-opener, both in terms of the historical overview the collection gives us as well as its discussion of how the contemporary American sonnet as seen in the work of Terrance Hayes and Diane Seuss has developed and blossomed.
Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.
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