Evelyn Lee

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AN ODE TO WOMEN WHO HAVE BOTH OCD AND THE MISFORTUNE OF BEING
OBSESSED WITH TRUE CRIME

When you’re on a date and the man asks what your worst fear is,
say, Men asking me what my worst fear is
and when he laughs like you are the punchline of your own joke,
tell him that when your eyes couldn’t stop darting from
dark corner to dark corner of your room at night,
you started sleeping with the lights on
and your back against the wall like a scared child.
Tell him that when you couldn’t stop imagining
a man eclipsed behind your cracked bedroom door,
his silhouette painted against the kitchen window,
his body flat against the floor under your bed,
his breath loud and wet and heavy in the dark–
you made a day of unscrewing your closet doors off their
hinges. You made a day of taking apart your bed frame
until it was nothing but a tangled metal carcass on the floor.
Say that you’ve been making a habit of showering with
the curtains peeled off the rail so you are not met
with the sharp surprise of a knife and your own death
on your tiled bathroom floor. Say your worst fear is
surprise parties. Say you do not like surprises.
Say you’ve rehearsed your death like it is a
one act play you know all the parts to.
Say you’ve already written your obituary
to avoid the clumsy speech of men who
do not know you. Say that you’ve been
making a ritual of checking if the door’s
locked. Say the clicking of the deadbolt
is a prayer you recite twenty times before bed.
Say that when locking the doors stopped
being enough, you started making sure the windows
were locked too and when locking the windows
stopped being enough, tell him you installed burglar bars.
and when the man asks, But what if there is a fire?
a smirk tracing the corners of his lips like
he has outsmarted you, say you don’t fear fire.
Say you would rather burn with half your body
hanging through the window than ever let him
cut the screen and crawl inside.

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DEER SEASON

The most important lesson your father will teach you is how to kill,
to rest the shotgun on your shoulder and aim for the heart and lungs
so the blood is still pink and full of air. He will teach you how to
lift the deer into the back of his truck, to tie it down with nylon rope,
and it will be the first time you discover how to lift deadweight,
the first time you discover that, even after something is dead,
it still bruises when tied up.

At home, your mother carves into it because she knows best the
anatomy of a hunted thing. Your mother knows a dead deer like
she knows her own body as she slices into the crisscrossing
muscles, digs out the joints to easily separate bone from bone.
and you will pick the scraps clean with your teeth, pull dark meat
off bone with sticky fingers.

The most important lesson your father will teach you
is that any hunted animal is called venison after it’s killed.
Not just deer, he says. Women are venison too.
Your mother is venison, he admits and tells you their love story
and it’s in that moment you learn how to dig freezers
into the soft Ohio dirt, to bury women’s bodies in corn fields
when the corn is still high and the dirt is still thick and wet
from summer. There’s a reason deer season begins in September,
your father says. We’ve been waiting all summer for
the corn to grow high enough to disappear into.

It’s on these hunting trips that you learn to collect trophies:
antlers, shotgun shells, women’s underwear. It is there that
your father will grab you by the shoulder and say, Son,
when the police pull you into their interrogation room
and ask you how long you’ve been hunting here, say
“Always.”

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IN THIS POEM THE GUN IS NOT A PHALLIC SYMBOL
THE GUN IS JUST A GUN

I do not compare the girl’s body to raw meat.
I do not compare the man to sharp teeth

or a dog or a rifle. In this poem, nothing dies.
There is no feast. We do not unfold the table cloth.

We do not slice bread and spread butter.
We do not lay the carcass on the table.

We do not clasp hands around it. We do not thank
god. We do not beg for mercy. We don’t need to.

Here, there is no salt to dry our meat. There are
no freezers to preserve our pork and sausage.

There is no sugar to sweeten our coffee.
There are no deer, so there is no venison.

There are no saltlicks. There are no traps to fall into.
The shovel resting against the house is just a shovel.

The overturned dirt is just dirt. Our father’s accusing finger
is just our father’s accusing finger.

The rifle on the table is unloaded.
There are no dead snakes. There are no blue jays

caught in its throat. This writhing girl is not an animal.
The man does not pick up his fork. God does not

look away. Here, there are no hands to hold.
There are no legs to part. There are no beds to

sleep in. There are no sheets to clean.
There are no windows to fall out of.

There is no table to eat at. There are no fruit
to split. There are no trees to meet under.

There are no rivers to drown in. There are
no rocks to stuff my pockets with,

no rocks to trip over, no rocks to split my head open.
The rifle does not go off. The rifle is

on the floor, empty. Thank god
there is no mud on my skirt. Thank god

my shoes are not off. Thank god there is
no gunpowder under my fingernails.

Thank god his belt is not undone.
Thank god my lipstick is not on

his pillow.

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Banner Art:
Head of a Roebuck and Two Ptarmigan, Edwin Henry Landseer, 1825-1835, Art Institute of Chicago