if William carlos Williams was getting divorced
Emily Hillebrand
The Academy of American Poets
fails to report what went on
between picturesque notes
scrawled on receipts and envelopes.
Flossie Williams loved plums
more than sex. The poet’s wife
kept this private joy in the far corner
of the icebox, hidden by the grapefruit
and the blueberries, blushing and ripe
where her husband’s greedy hands
wouldn’t reach. But reach they did.
William Carlos Williams stretched
his skinny fingers to rearrange the icebox
like he did the living room,
a throw blanket and embroidered pillow
doubling as a bed, twentieth-century
decorum be damned. He rolled the fruit
in his hands, held the flesh up to his mouth
and let the cold numb his lips before
sinking teeth into its soft pink underbelly.
The juice ran all the way up his arm,
onto the white shirt she starched
three days ago in the September sun,
so that when he crafted the note
and left it crumpled on the kitchen table,
it was dripping with the evidence
of his seed.
When Floss came home
she found her heart in the icebox,
laid there with her husband’s pen
and the frosted pit. She cradled
the frozen ventricles between her hands,
held the dead blue thing up to her mouth
for a kiss, and let her lips turn numb.
The Academy of American Poets
does not detail what happens
to a divorcée in 1909.
It does not describe
how “this is just to say”
becomes the strangest rotten fruit
in the glow of a lamp,
white gloves stained
by freeze-dried blood.