Jendi Reiter

Portrait of a Marriage

We lost the negatives in the basement.
I wanted it all, the holy canopy,
being a public virgin—white silk flowers and eyes bloody
from forced-in contacts.
How much could it really hurt
our mothers? On a scale of tattoo to mastectomy,
nothing compares to you
and me fighting
for our sacred bed.
You wanted it all
to make sense, or be honest
about the madness.
We never made up
the wedding album. Now I’m no longer a girl
I wish I’d saved my hair.
Like the cake topper
we froze for a year
and couldn’t eat.
We were used
to calculating many pleasures
not worthwhile.
To be properly married
one must register
for a waffle iron.
We rubbed their faces in it,
those old conventions, though no one
would give me away. All the dead smiling
in these photographs, some sincerely
happy now to have left
their plus-ones.
We dug up the pictures to prove
we weren’t alone
so a girl would give us her accidental baby.
That year I was in free-fall
between the generations.

Maybe I won’t forgive you
for telling the social worker I cut myself.

Flash-forward to happiness,
or an ordinary kind of trouble.
On a scale of incest flashbacks to midnight feedings,
waking up scarred
into manhood was easy
for me and I don’t care
about anyone.
Probably you’ll forgive me
for becoming un-bridal.
Picture: how
we needn’t stay the same to stay.

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Jendi Reiter is the author of five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022); the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2018); and the novels Origin Story (Saddle Road Press, 2024) and Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016). Origin Story was a finalist for the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press and Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.