My ex’s lies are nothing like my own (after Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130”)
My ex’s lies are nothing like my own;
at most, I’d omit a few shades of love;
my soul holed up inside my collarbone
my heart in limbo to be worthy of
my ex, my lying, stone-heart of an ex
or, if that killing silence at the end
makes “ex” so full of love that heart rejects,
suffice to say they proved as false a friend.
I’ve cried my tears and worried myself sick
how I could miss such signs of unkindness;
but then to blame me’s yet another trick;
that liars turn to keep us in distress.
I say ‘us’ in reference to fellow fools
the world would likewise leap to ridicule.
Reading Lear through the lens of things you broke in me
Four to five hours after the initial shock
a guilty thought skitters by:
what if somehow this is my fault? What if
like King Lear, I couldn’t wait
for the words you’d utter, and not
the feeling hiding underneath?
To read our last talk, it could be mapped like
compass keys onto the severing of Lear from Cordelia.
It could, if it weren’t for every other fact about you and I,
if it weren’t for the truth.
I imagine inviting you to tell it,
and the inexcusable, throat-clearing silence
that would follow. Let me fill it:
the truth is what I’ve decided since
are the three most venomous words in the English language
when taken together, “I don’t know,”
your words, not mine, as in
“I don’t know anything about the pain I’m causing,” or
“I don’t know how you’ll get back all the time
I let you waste on me,” or even,
“I don’t know how to be a decent fucking human being,”
—the figure, returning to Lear,
who was in alignment with the whole “I don’t know” stance
was one of the minor servant characters,
and it seems to me to read our last talk
it is smartest to plot you and I on the middle dialogue
of the pissant traitor servant and the noble Kent
(Kent was always my favorite, and the words he speaks of loyalty
pertain strictly to you)
in short it will never be fair
and it will never make sense
how willing, how cold you were in giving me up
just like Oswald foresought the house of Lear.
All I know is that if you ever come again to my door
wet or shivering
cold or bloody
starving or raving
I’ll return the favor, leave you out in the tempest
and let the winds put cracks in your rosy cheeks
to teach you as you taught me
what it is to have a halcyon beak turn on you
and cry “I don’t know,”
when you have asked whether they care for your heart at all.
pomme grenade
remembering the Elizabethan lyrists when I try
to write about how much
I hate you
right now.
Maybe it’s how those proto-aesthetes took in life,
dripping pomegranate blood through the fingers
of both hands, mouths open, nostrils full.
I confess since you dropped me
it has been a thought that grabs me roughly, every once in a while:
you should have your pomegranates taken away from you. Maybe your hands, too.
What I mean is, I felt it when you hijacked my life with a viper grip,
and wrung from me (pints of hope and quarts of meaning)
(volume color substance) and you are not forgiven for it.
Neither is it easy today
in my new blood orange bowling shirt printed with monarch butterflies
to stomach how you will walk away from me
how you lined my ribs with lies, seed-sized bleeds,
each intube sapping color from memory,
pleasure from the now, intravascular, the way parasites are.
(suffering nothing) I know how the host feels
more than anything they talked about in biology class.
now with what ancients called the apple of Carthage,
(doomed devoured with salt)
when I hear that the filbertworm is a pest
targets pomegranates
and shits heedlessly all over
whatever tender flesh they burrow in.
I am seeing through the eyes of the grenade-apple,
you beige or pink or dark brown
eating through my heart with nothing to give
back but indiscreet worm-shit
and I am wishing I was poisoned before you
withering up aching spitting a last curse of hunger:
hunger will dog you after,
even the fatal, tiny bites of life you take
sour in your mouth
and leave you feeling ridden with holes.
Sarah Hajkowski is a senior studying English and Theatre at Brevard College in Brevard, NC, graduating Spring 2023. In alignment with Outrageous Fortune, she is a lover of Shakespeare and drama, and views literary arts as a malleable cultural connective tissue. Sarah’s current projects include a 20-poem collection about loss entitled Brain to Pick: hostility and healing. She believes passionately in the power of the written word to change the world.