thisbe on the walls
I remember the days with my mother occasionally—as if a deluge of memories barging past the filaments of light that greet me each morning and demand to be heard. An audience whose muffled voices return to me nostalgic with apricot glows and clean countertops, the gradual cloying scent of fabric softener. From the kitchen, drifting along the hallway towards the living room—catalogues on the carpet depicting delighted children with toys, their faces blurred by a fading brightness, marking a time that has swarmed away like city bees dying in waves. My mother did not marry my father happily. Wed by force, even. A contract is a contract—immutable even if the paper with which its signatures are carved in crumbles. I am the line, lover, you are forbidden from crossing. I am still a child. I am witness to the breath that grows hoarse each morning of your teenage years, the witness who distinguishes the grumble from your chest after we eat at the shitty local diner where the lopsided neon parrot outside flickers, half-dead, as if it too has something caught in its throat. I know how the oil from the fries settles in your stomach like the chemical diagram for fractional distillation—each fraction divided by increasing temperature, a heat even the lovers around us cannot mirror. O boy, baby, hot bayou bloom—I am witness to every frustration you have bitten back. Once, they built walls to keep cattle from wandering. Later, to keep wives from wandering. Later still, to keep God himself out. Next time, when we return to that cheap diner like animals to a salt lick, I will ask if you remember when the town’s visiting rabbi declared legs must not wander astray. I saw you shift uncomfortably, your pulsating crotch pressed against cotton walls. We were virgins then. The walls were never made of stone, were they? They were skin, bruising where our voices pressed too hard against them. They were the thin space between my ribs where thoughts drifted like feathers in a pillow. They were the hot, clammy silence between my name and the word wife. Walls, like wives, have always been trespassed against. Mr. Warner’s Latin class. We’re fifteen. A brown scrunchie in my hands, fingers rolling down the elastic, playing the soft arrows of my fingertips against the sharp snap of tension. You, chewing gum, absent (I don’t remember, I’m only presuming). Mr. Warner’s ventriloquising Livy—describing the rape of the Sabine women—how “the larger part were carried off indiscriminately, but some particularly beautiful girls who had been marked out for the leading patricians were carried to their houses by plebeians.” In my notebook, I drew these women, their bodies arranging themselves into the shape of something real and horrifyingly inevitable. Lately, I’ve been reading old property law. Under the Party Wall Act of 1996, a wall can be considered jointly owned by two property owners if both contributed to its construction. A boundary is only as strong as those willing to enforce it. Once, fathers placed their daughters in convents if they thought they spoke too freely. Once, Bluebeard mutilated his wives for crossing thresholds they were not meant to. Once, a man in Afghanistan commanded his wife to be veiled from sound entirely. Once, a person can enter a house only to find there is no door behind them, just a vast endless corpse of wood blocking their way. I think of myself like that, pressed up against something larger than myself, listening for proof that something once waited for me on the other side. These walls will outlive us. They will outlive the houses that built themselves around them, the whispers that vined through them, the initials carved by hands that feared they would otherwise disappear. I do not know if I have built my life around them or against them. I only know that I am still here, speaking into the wood, as if it could be convinced.
Ali C is a poet and author of a chapbook, NIGHT OF THE FIRE, forthcoming with Ethel Zine & Micro Press in May 2025. Learn more at www.alixyz.club