Thrush Poetry Journal
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Jessica Abughattas 
​

First Marriage
 
I’m not one thing.
I’m changing all the time. 
 
My long hair was modest. 
It covered everything. 
 
By my standards, it was a field. 
Recurring dream of hidden places. 
 
In a beat-up cottage we went 
in circles tied together. Delusion: I thought 
 
you could, but wouldn’t. You don’t know 
a thing about a November full of mornings 
 
in my mother's kitchen. Washing all her dishes.
I never wanted to be anyone’s nagging wife, mending 
 
and wading like a ghost in the herb garden. It happens 
to the best of us. You find an electric bull of a man, 
 
latch on and cling until he throws you off. 
Honey, I’m retired from the rodeo. 
 
The house is on a street in the past where I left it. 
I drove by today in daylight:
 
The vines are overgrown.
I saw one zinnia.
Your tools are strewn across the lawn.
 
The sunflowers came back.




Jessica Abughattas is a poet of Palestinian heritage. Her first book, Strip, won the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara. A Kundiman fellow, her poems appear in Guernica, Lit Hub, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.




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