They want to hold a marriage conference,
where we’ll all nod, say, “Oh yes,
marriage is hard,”

like it’s a grand secret, where we will not
say how, but we will all know
about Adam and Eve’s greatest practical

joke, made at our own expense—and how it’s called
marriage! Or perhaps they’ll detail
the nightmare that they’ve feared for me

in its full, traumatizing specifics,
of all the strange abuse that someone,
somewhere—

I mean the book’s
author—
inflicted.

And the different abuse
that the author now wants men
to inflict instead.

Don’t they know they scared me away from marrying
anything less than the world’s safest souls?
No, neither invasive nor evasive.

I don’t want to submit
to the “Oh, yes,” script! My marriage
itself lacks script.

I do not even
know these people.
I don’t understand them at all.

first published in Poetry as Promised Magazine