Limboed by Joanna Valente

His wife didn't like to go out on Friday nights,
It made things awkward between them.
She would paint her face on, her face older
than her body, swaying sometimes, her head.
There was a goodness

in her hair still. He would tell her to put it up,
like an upside down root praying to go back
home beneath the earth. She preferred Saturdays,
sometimes Sunday afternoons looking at pictures
of her father, hundreds dying before

him and after him. She touches her stingy belly, with its
stretch marks running untamed. She is disgusted, outwitted
by them and almost remembers what it was like in
the womb. Before she was a girl, she remembers when
yearning wasn't the only way.

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Black-Listed Magazine is an online literary magazine. We publish on a rolling basis: weekly, daily, sometimes hourly. Send submissions here: blacklistedmagazine@hotmail.com

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