Elizabeth

It is not wholly against convention to marry every now
and then. When it comes

to love and other bodily functions, a man, of any height or
kind, is expected to go hastily awry. When he loved

that woman,
that fat woman with no look to her except the spread

of short and unremarkable legs, and planned to marry
and be married to her, he said

that he’d gone crazy, suicidal, off the ship again
in the way that always ended inhospitably

straitjacketed and shouldn’t that excuse everything,
every pronunciation of love. She wore

a ring. On her hands that would no longer hold
the sum of men she’d opened for, knowing all the while that

a face so plainly horrid would never earn more than
the angry touching of some previously broken hearted man,

she wore a ring. What plea could be made after
but insanity in its most gruesome,

unadulterated form. What potential is there in a man
who exalts so easily

in that bent knee for which the world tilts at the weight
of her acceptance, that woman,

all fat and unremarkable women that require and result in
continual forgiveness for the act.