Two Poems by Michelle Ott

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On Learning to Be Alone

You are not supposed to want it
out loud (or so I am told):

the breaking open of the sternum,
the flooding of cherry-red desire,

the tying of stems and tongues
and knots and lives.

So unbecoming of a woman to want
something more than herself.

(I never said I was
not already whole.)

This is preparation, I am told:
cooking dinners for one in silent

houses, packing noteless lunches
for unkissed tomorrows, sleeping

in unwarmed beds with nothing
but the imitation of intimacy.

This, I am told, is how I will learn
to be worthy of love.

When will I ripen, sweeten enough
to be consumed by someone

other than Grief? Or am I to rot
on the branch in my solitude,

grow older and whiter and uglier
until not even the laziest low-

fruit picker will have me?
I know what it is to be alone.

I want to drink the sweet juice
of unbecoming, unraveling in another’s palm,

let it drip down my chin to be lapped up
by a woman just as whole as me.

Instead, I am told to be patient.
I fear that I am not that virtuous.

Lot Looks upon Her Wife, Now Salt

When I asked you to hold me,
I did not mean like this:
my heart a dead weight
in your palms, fingers curled
around the handle, grinding
my love against the whetstone
until it is sharp enough to kiss
the cruelly fragile skin of your wrist.
Is this how the good Lord said
to cherish the kind and patient love
He has promised you?

I must walk backwards to see you, now,
growing smaller as you stay
right where you left me: kneeling
in penitence, plum-painted patellae
haloed in sickly, tender yellow,
praying the rosary at the altar
of your righteous self-punishment.
Your God weeps and you take His tears
like the sacrament. To you it is sweet.

I do not know God from Adam,
this much I know. But is it such heresy
to say that suffering is not holiness?
Is it not a sin to look upon the face
of an unending heavenly love,
to hold a forgiveness paid in blood
upon the cross, and spit at the feet
of the Father who formed you, blessed
you with a worth you never needed to earn?

Sweetheart, I could have never loved you
through this. You only ever take
what you think you deserve.

Michelle Ott is a queer poet and writer from the Mid-Atlantic. She earned her MFA in creative writing from American University in 2023, where she served as a contributing writer for the university’s MFA student-run blog, CafeMFA. Her poetry has been featured in BOOTH Magazine, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Impostor: A Poetry Journal, among others. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Image: see filename or category, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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