Practicing for the Police Test

Alone at night in bed,

she hugs her own back, shrunk

into rippled strength. research gone mad, her husband says

She runs a hand over her leg:

it’s like someone else’s,

the way muscle stretches hard

over bone.

She is hard, in this embodiment, swaggers when she walks, will not ask for kisses

the way she stares without blinking

down the barrel

of her husband’s disapproval

when he is home (seldom).

She sits on the green sofa,

he on the beige. Raised newspaper

isolates

the two of them.

She wants to say, & does not

Be proud

of me. Her eyes tear. at night, a white bird sits on her chest & mourns

The gap between them whistles

with the dark of what her husband aims

and aims.

**

Zoë Landale teaches creative writing at Kwantlen University College in Richmond, BC. She is the author of five books. The Rain is Full of Ghosts, a novel, and Blue in this Country, poetry, are her most recent books.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/landzoe_poems.htm