Katharyn Howd Machan
My poem (which is not autobiographical, but drawn from another woman’s life) arose from the essential courage required to be disobedient to wrong patriarchal values that shape rules differently for men and for women.
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At 55 You Get the Guts to Tell Off Your Ex-Husband
so you’re on your way to Newfoundland
to face him there, finally deliver
the words you’ve always clenched inside
the way he used to ball his fingers
before he hit you and called you dirt
or punched a wall or threw the food
you cooked and baked and stirred
the words that bulged and cut and burned
that you couldn’t dare, you didn’t try
because if you did he might push farther,
pick up a gun or a stiletto
and spit as he fired or stabbed
and you’d have been dead at 27
and maybe left in a ditch
decades now you’ve still kept quiet
even though he ran off sneering
with another woman, a pale small woman
whose mouth looked like it never opened
or could even stretch into a smile
and he emptied out the bank account
and even took your clothes
life change, soul change: you cut your hair,
went back to school, bought used blue jeans,
discovered books written by brave women
and shared them with new friends, but
never wrote your own true story,
never talked of blood and bruises
and the way night still holds knives
but now you’ve bought an airplane ticket
with money slowly saved these years
of working in a good library
where you’ve seen words save lives:
you’ve just been told that you are dying,
the doctors say six months, a year,
and you just have to make that bastard
hear just how well you’ve outgrown your fear
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Katharyn Howd Machan, Professor of Writing at Ithaca College, holds degrees from the College of Saint Rose, the University of Iowa, and Northwestern University. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines; in anthologies/textbooks such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013, Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now, Literature, Sound and Sense, Writing Poems; and in 32 collections, most recently H (Gribble Press, 2014) and Wild Grapes: Poems of Fox (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Former director of the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc., in 2012 she edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology (Split Oak Press).