Ras Mashramani goes to community college and spends a lot of time avoiding her students on the internet. She measures her self-worth via page hits to her blog, motherwap.blogspot.com.

Two Poems (February 20, 2011. Issue 25.)

Let's be a couple on a hill

Yes, let’s get married young and sad and hopeful, banking our future on enthusiasm and sexual fervor and how we’re so honest with each other, you know?. Let’s casually mention our unique connection to envious friends in their mid-twenties. Let’s have civil, mature disputes in front of your parents to instill in them the pure faith that at least these two kids are gonna make it. Let’s give our world hope and put them to shame. Let’s be a couple on a hill and make it biblical.

Let’s hold ourselves to near impossible relational expectations, than crash and burn under our own immaturity and childhoods. Let’s arouse each other with stories of sexual abuse and pass it off as bitter, necessary sincerity, the kind we brag about the next day, leaving out the parts where we whispered how much we deserved it under the sweaty quilt my mother gave us last Thanksgiving.

Another combat related extended metaphor for domesticity

Again, again the floor proceeds to fall
Away and give away how much she needs
his words and give away how soft she is,
The Wife [the young--they fall apart so quick!]
she splits, her skin it seeps with cyclosarin.
His shudder cries, ‘Contain the bomb!’ He tries
He’ll try until the roof and walls give up.

Inside the house, the dog, the cat, retreat.
Inside the house The Wife can’t keep her mouth
from splitting [gash]. Retreat! So that the neigh-
bors sleep without their ears against the floor.
Upon the shelf their brains can rest until
The laundry’s done. Until the floor proceeds
again to fall away and then again

[until this meter can no longer contain our trench war
And with gas masks we emerge with our fingers on the button.
You started it, and I’m done. I’ll slaughter you until I’ve won,
and with my foot against your teeth, I’ll ask ‘What was it, Love?’
Your frozen mouth will say it was the silence.]