The Poem I Wrote for Our Life Together
Born on a bed of eggshells, I broke them
by virtue of my body’s weight, by moving.
Soon I grew used to their give and crack.
My parents fed me eggshells. My tongue
licked the hard protective bloom. My teeth
ground down thin layers of calcium carbonate.
Those proteins were all I had. With a brush
and albumen glue, I painted the crystals
from crushed shells on the mold of my body.
The clothes I made creased and fractured
at my elbows and knees, split when I sat,
so I learned to stay still, straight leg standing.
Beneath me, the eggshell floor splintered
with each step. Helpless, I called my lover
who climbed through the jagged holes
we called windows. I could have predicted
he would break everything he touched
and then accuse me of carelessness, and he did.
I felt myself cleave under him in the way
I was taught to want. The membranes
of my body collapsing, reminding me of birth.
Our gentle thrashing destroyed the house.
I no longer cared for the bed, the clothes
whose delicate remnants I stuffed in my mouth.
After, I woke up naked, alone, and hungry.
Of course, I wear regular clothes and live
in a regular house, my diet varies, and I leave
when I please. I was never crushed, not
like this, but the eggshells say what I mean:
that no matter how careful I am, grief will come.
*
The Apartment
after “Dream House as World Building,”
from In the Dream House: A Memoir
by Carmen Maria Machado
My unit looked like every other unit, or close,
more than one hundred copies, but to explain,
it was on the third floor, new apartment in a brand-new
building. Safer, I thought, before I understood
being unsafe. It was the first new place I’d ever lived.
No broken plumbing or fat roaches scuttling
from kitchen drawers, scaring my daughter, our first
like that. You need to know that I cried happy tears
when we moved in, not everyone would rejoice,
but we did. My daughter did. Two floors below,
his apartment was laid out exactly the same. When
he first moved in under me, I felt déjà vu
in those bare rooms. A tenant for years, I’d known
the families in that place before him, but it must
be said, I hardly knew him when he moved in
as my boyfriend, this close proximity never
my wish, whatever you want to believe. Our primary
bedrooms had four large windows, and mine
on the third floor overlooked a small engineering firm
whose employees took lunch hour walks or on cold days,
dusted snow from their windshields in the parking lot,
warm exhaust plumes, visible puffs of breath.
I don’t know if he ever looked out his windows
except at me, but I kept my blinds open, so anything
I felt—my fear—I projected on this scene. Visitors
doted on the size of my primary bedroom, spacious
like the bedroom of a house. Like his bedroom,
this space would become a site of violence. I tried
to describe to my lawyers, to the judge, the suffocating
closeness of the landing and stairs, too narrow
for two-way traffic. We could only walk single file
as I held my daughter’s hand, shushing her,
because we lived on top of each other, tripping over
one another, peering inside one other’s units,
and I had no way to bypass the lower doors,
his door, but he could have avoided coming upstairs
to mine. Nobody asked him to treat those stairs
or my door like an extension of his home. Outside,
a walkway led from the building to our cars,
situated so no one approached our building without
being seen. It was grand—to the degree that it could be—
but it afforded no privacy. We all knew who came
or went. After I left him, that walkway became
a problem, like the pet waste stations, excuse
for anyone, but especially him holding his leashed dog,
to stand staring up at my balcony. When I imagine
him, and I sometimes still do, he is looking up.
*
You Need to Connect with the Heroine of Your Story
The cards say it. The pointer on every spinning wheel.
What’s that meme? You are the one who is coming to save you.
Inside me lives a connoisseur of risk that for a time I chose not to heed.
Such finely tuned intuition moves beyond awareness of predator or prey.
I’m not innocent but I forget catalogues of lessons in order
to get through the day. She never left me. Rather I turned
from knowing. I thought I chose love, but it was a facsimile, a pack
of torture devices bundled in gauze. The heroine says one day you’ll see
this relationship as a vehicle for creative growth. We could have gone
on longer, my friends know. I stopped us. His friends might
have scoffed, he wouldn’t hurt you, but he had no friends and he had already
hurt me. The heroine isn’t writing about bruises but a topography of pain.
What is it they say? Some things you can’t unsee. You can’t unfeel.
The low voice at the table, wise hands on my shoulders.
The heroine says don’t think about all you ignored, but that you finally saw.
*
The Universe Wants
The universe wants me to change the locks.
The universe wants me to take his things to Goodwill.
The universe wants me to wipe his fuck off with a guy I meet online.
The universe wants this story to be personal but not too personal.
The universe wants me to petition the court.
The universe wants the police to be unable to enforce the order due to proximity.
The universe wanted him to be my neighbor though I never wanted it.
The universe wants every lawyer I meet to tell me I’m fortunate we aren’t married. That we have
no children or property together.
The universe wants his new girlfriend to smudge stick his apartment.
The universe wants him to subpoena our neighbors.
The universe wants all of the people he subpoenaed to have nothing to say.
The universe wants me to have to move because I am truly afraid and the order is unenforceable.
The universe wants me to apply for tenure and submit my application while moving.
The universe wants me to lose two dress sizes walking off my anger for hours a day.
The universe wants my telogen effluvium.
The universe wants this story to be relatable.
The universe wants our hearing continually delayed.
The universe wants my nervous breakdown outside the courthouse.
The universe wants my dosage doubled.
The universe wants my mother to break her back when visiting me for the hearing he delayed.
The universe wants my mother to do the nine hour car ride again on a broken back.
The universe wants my father to ask to try reasoning with my abuser and for me to stop him.
The universe wants me to help others understand the threat is actual.
The universe wants the hearing—is ravenous for the hearing.
The universe wants my neighbor who was going to testify for me to get Covid.
The universe wants my best friend to have laryngitis during her testimony.
The universe wants people to keep telling me they know this will teach my abuser a lesson.
The universe knows I didn’t want the order to punish him.
The universe knows what happened between us.
The universe knows what love is and is not.
The universe wants the judge to grant the order without a scratch on me.
The universe wants my abuser to have to pay my lawyer’s fees.
The universe wants him to move away.
The universe wants my head to begin to clear.
The universe wants to know whether this story will save anybody.
The universe tells me I am watched over by ancestors.
The universe wants me to feel creative.
The universe wants this story reborn into another form.
The universe wants me to transform.
The universe has been telling me all along. I am close.
*
A Year Out
I woke and showered and readied for work,
but I don’t remember what I ate or whether
I ate. I think I was bracing myself, knew
what was coming, but who can know,
and I can only speak from retrospect, it’s all
I have in this moment. I might not have eaten.
I might have dreamed the night before,
but that I don’t know that, either. So much
of this process is understanding which facts
matter. It matters that my daughter was in
her second week of second grade, precise age
she’ll never know again. Does it matter
that she carried the bag she wore to school
before that morning, and for many days after,
and that he bought it for her? I might recall
the bag bouncing against her legs as she ran,
the sun reflected white on her blond skull,
or I might have made it up, but regardless,
I know that one morning about a year ago
after my former partner tried to assault us,
I went to a shelter, and then, I told my story
to a judge, and more, I said what happened
to anyone who would listen. It’s true, of course,
but so much more is true, like any big feeling
barely contained, there is this tenuous
courting of disaster behind it. Even so,
a story took shape, solidified. So what
if it was only adrenaline, the heat I felt course
through me, my arms frozen to the chair,
my legs crossed, for months, the shallow
breaths I took as I loaded the dishwasher
or taught a class, packed a sandwich or applied
for tenure. I gave up my words to advocates
a few hours after it happened, offered them forth
to build a story, in the rounded longhand
of the woman who wrote it down for me, for
the judge, yes, but also the person in the chair
who had to go home that night and protect
her daughter. I’m no fool. What really happened
is true but also manufactured. A document.
A year since I first began that delicate
piecework, that shaping, I can bend my story
at will. Flimsy, made up of sensations I pulled
from my deeper parts, and a year out, I want
to access that realm of my body, my insensible,
living-outside-of-narrative self, more than
posture or breath but the part of me that
moves or stays still, that acts. The self
returned from elsewhere that says, you are safe.
It’s August, a year later, and broiling hot.
Before sense retreats, I let the sun touch me.
*
Erin Hoover is the author of three poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Consent (Black Lawrence, 2027). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, in 2026-2027.