Jacqueline Berger

July 31, 2020

“Women with Men” by Jacqueline BergerPosted by

Jacqueline Berger

WOMEN WITH MEN

Walking one evening 
with my husband in the park,
we hear moaning from the bathroom—
a girl on her knees 
clutching the toilet, 
a guy fucking her from behind.
Should we call the police?
Or yell to see if she needs help?
According to my husband
they’re just kids too drunk 
to care about the public 
setting of their sex. 

True, we didn’t see her struggle.
Do nothing, keep walking,
the cinderblocks darkening behind us.
A dozen years ago,
but I think of her sometimes. 

Girl on her knees, 
now nearing thirty,
does she remember 
that night, or is it lost
in a blur of bad
or semi-bad, or only messy
attempts at love?
Maybe she was dragged 
from the path 
and what looked like lack 
of struggle was betrayal,
her voice on mute and her body,
what could she do but abandon it?
My own voice
buried like a small animal
under a tree another animal
digs up and devours. 

—from Rattle #68, Summer 2020

__________

Jacqueline Berger: “I was riding my bike in Golden Gate Park, not far from where the event in this poem took place a decade earlier. Suddenly the whole moment rushed back into focus, and with it the persistent shame of having done nothing. I betrayed my instinct to act, but, too, my instinct to avoid was revealed. Into these impossible places of inner conflict, send poetry.” (web)

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November 18, 2014

“Ruin Porn” by Jacqueline BergerPosted by

Jacqueline Berger

RUIN PORN

A woman in a poem wants to be raped
to have the third child
she and her husband have both agreed
they can’t handle or afford.
Doesn’t fantasize more money or help
but force, because we’re all sick
of our ledgers, pros to one side
cons to the other,
so being slammed against a wall,
having the wishbone of her legs pried apart,
though the poet doesn’t speak of this,
the strain of muscles that know
they’re going to lose, being slammed
has in our rational lives an appeal. 
We hire out our wild,
dress him in black, cram
his head into a ski mask,
who wraps a handful of our hair
in his fist, drives us to our knees.

We fondle the details,
infinite losses a body suffers—
aneurism, embolism. How many hours
or days unconscious before death
slips his gloved hand
over the mouth and nose,
ushers one in the dark
to her seat?
Easier to talk about
the leak than the plug,
what we didn’t intend to lose
and not how we wanted
to be filled. 

A friend around the table
tells a story: a woman
with a vicious desire—
coming made her angry—
died an hour after.
Odd word, stroke, the tenderness
of a hand running its length
over a surface. The opposite
of strike, a field of flaming poppies
rising on a cheek.

No one wants to die,
but no one wants to live forever,
so how not love the thief
who favors us with the end?
We don’t know our lives
face to face but from behind.
From a distance,
shape and meaning.
In the middle, the picture pulses,
pinwheels of color.
We’re showered, struck
and dumbstruck.

—from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

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__________

Jacqueline Berger: “It’s kind of exciting, kind of shameful, the feeling we get looking at horrible images, so the theory of ruin porn goes. But expand the definition of arousal, and the pornographic becomes the poetic. We read poetry to be lured from the daily hypnosis by the startle of lyric. As for ruin—loss, grief in its infinite shadings—there’s nothing shameful about being compelled by that which we can’t avoid.” (website)

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