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she’d beg of you to leave him be.
if she believed it would do him good,
she’d take him out to dinner—the nasty old man.
there is a routine, here. she’ll deny him his vodka,
deny you his war crimes.

(deny herself human,
dance herself dry.)

"Live and let live." she says with a flourish of bubblegum in her throat,
and all without missing the irony where her voice crouches down
tight to a whisper because these days pacifist maxims
just make him cry. she holds tight to them anyway,
still just a child at heart.

(“And aren’t we all.” he’d snarl,
knowing that children too
know death.)

that night, he cries into her gut. sleeps fearful. when she tells him he is safe now
she becomes a liar and a lover. he knows her for neither—
the next morning there is a bruise on her forehead,
the size and shape of a spatula.
it is her third eye. it makes her wise. it makes you humbled.

and when she gives him sass it is her own little form
of rapture. her skirt hiked high, tight-jawed heels on,
she dances all hips to Ballad of a Teenage Queen. autonomy, automated
and played back on tape, ex-movie-star. you can’t move. you can’t
breathe. "Nice shoes", you tell her. and you’d like to think that
when you say these things, it’s not entirely out of pity.

see, he only hits her when she calls him a murderer, or anything less.
"This ain’t ‘Nam, Mister. You can’t step inside this house
and expect to remain a killer.” and surely he’ll strike her like a match but oh,
does he pay his dues in bile. and that night he is awake and spitting,
gunshots like smooth jazz and the limbs of men like colors in his eyes.
she sleeps sweetly through the whole thing,
body too enraged to hear the screaming.

but when that body’s in doubt, she holds him down in fits. carries the weight
from his chest on phone trees and support groups.
so you try not to make it into a big deal. even trapped beneath him,
she’s stronger, knows he’s no man. there’s a pattern here, though,
where she twists her spine and lines up her hands just right with the bruises.
her skirt so high it’s over her head, a star in the sky that she’ll wish on.

and maybe, you think, children’s dreams really do come true, if only for a while.
you can see it in her face, that resignation, that dancing coil.
she cannot stop herself because she cannot stop him either.
and so some nights she’s happy,
and some nights he’s too drunk to argue. but with all his stumbling,
one shoe on, one eye buzzing, he dives: music plays,
he grabs her by the waist, lifts her by the light, and woos her.

(you take your leave, then;
better to remember them as they were.)