My Wife Gets Groped at a South Carolina Dive Bar
Ephraim Sommers
This is the ache of someone else’s
finger fish-hooking
my wife’s blue blouse open
and spilling his eyes
the color of octopus ink
and Guinness
down her chest,
exposed. This bald-
headed motherfucker
in a black tie,
and Adam, no surprise, is his name,
but he is not the first asshole on Earth,
though in this first version
of our response,
he gets away with it.
This fuckhead.
This target of burnt skin
where his high and tight
Hitler haircut
should be. In the second version,
my wife, who is a harder motherfucker
than I’ll ever be,
who has been high-kicking
the speed bag
so many recent summer mornings,
forearms the dude unconscious
under the foosball table.
In another version,
my biceps begin
with an anger
as swollen as a hippo’s ass
and end with the pint glass
in my right hand
bashing the blood
in red swamps
and brain clumps
out of his ears.
This fucking skinhead-ed
businessman. In another version,
he gets away with it
again, the silence
of South Carolina,
yawning. In another,
the country band honky-tonks
through a song called,
Fuck the patriarchy!
while we throw lettuce
and hamburger patties.
In another,
Were you flirting?
Her friends ask.
What were you wearing?
In another, I go to jail
for raping him
with a golf umbrella
and lose my job
at the university.
In another, my wife
tells no one.
In another, I write a letter
to the Minority Whip, bitching.
In another, we blame television.
In another, we argue about gun control.
In another,
history dissolves
like daylight,
and we live in a year
where my wife
is believed
and rightly defended
by the bartenders and the country band,
and they hang the balding man
in the town square
beside the fountain shooting
foam higher than the roofs
of all the brick churches
in Rock Hill, South Carolina,
or the bald man hangs himself
above the bar.
This is his punching bag
for a body. This is our singular
container into which we stuff
all the ways we will explain away
a wrong, so we can
better forget it, forget her,
forget this bald fucking
bobble-head with a smile a quarter-mile wide,
who is right now Sunday-strolling
out the back of the bar
for a smoke
having blown up another woman’s life
while all of us stand here,
tranquilized, because we are
who we’ve always been,
in every version, though I am not the balding man,
I am the husband of the wife
the balding man has assaulted,
and I am also every set of necks
gone red
from turning away
from my wife and from my friends Liz and Lynn
and Alexis who were also groped
in South Carolina, and from other women
elsewhere on television,
because in every next version after this one,
who men like me and the balding man can never be
are the next woman
in the next story
who will be murdered
behind the Shell Station
for looking good
in a blue blouse,
so in every next American version,
who all men like me must be
are those who will butcher
with chainsaws and meat hooks and tailgates and lye
every bald Adam they’ve ever known
and every version of him they’ve ever been.
Ephraim Sommers
This is the ache of someone else’s
finger fish-hooking
my wife’s blue blouse open
and spilling his eyes
the color of octopus ink
and Guinness
down her chest,
exposed. This bald-
headed motherfucker
in a black tie,
and Adam, no surprise, is his name,
but he is not the first asshole on Earth,
though in this first version
of our response,
he gets away with it.
This fuckhead.
This target of burnt skin
where his high and tight
Hitler haircut
should be. In the second version,
my wife, who is a harder motherfucker
than I’ll ever be,
who has been high-kicking
the speed bag
so many recent summer mornings,
forearms the dude unconscious
under the foosball table.
In another version,
my biceps begin
with an anger
as swollen as a hippo’s ass
and end with the pint glass
in my right hand
bashing the blood
in red swamps
and brain clumps
out of his ears.
This fucking skinhead-ed
businessman. In another version,
he gets away with it
again, the silence
of South Carolina,
yawning. In another,
the country band honky-tonks
through a song called,
Fuck the patriarchy!
while we throw lettuce
and hamburger patties.
In another,
Were you flirting?
Her friends ask.
What were you wearing?
In another, I go to jail
for raping him
with a golf umbrella
and lose my job
at the university.
In another, my wife
tells no one.
In another, I write a letter
to the Minority Whip, bitching.
In another, we blame television.
In another, we argue about gun control.
In another,
history dissolves
like daylight,
and we live in a year
where my wife
is believed
and rightly defended
by the bartenders and the country band,
and they hang the balding man
in the town square
beside the fountain shooting
foam higher than the roofs
of all the brick churches
in Rock Hill, South Carolina,
or the bald man hangs himself
above the bar.
This is his punching bag
for a body. This is our singular
container into which we stuff
all the ways we will explain away
a wrong, so we can
better forget it, forget her,
forget this bald fucking
bobble-head with a smile a quarter-mile wide,
who is right now Sunday-strolling
out the back of the bar
for a smoke
having blown up another woman’s life
while all of us stand here,
tranquilized, because we are
who we’ve always been,
in every version, though I am not the balding man,
I am the husband of the wife
the balding man has assaulted,
and I am also every set of necks
gone red
from turning away
from my wife and from my friends Liz and Lynn
and Alexis who were also groped
in South Carolina, and from other women
elsewhere on television,
because in every next version after this one,
who men like me and the balding man can never be
are the next woman
in the next story
who will be murdered
behind the Shell Station
for looking good
in a blue blouse,
so in every next American version,
who all men like me must be
are those who will butcher
with chainsaws and meat hooks and tailgates and lye
every bald Adam they’ve ever known
and every version of him they’ve ever been.
