By: Lyall Harris
Contract
nice to meet you too
you swooningly handsome smart creative
Italian whose parents are dear and adore me
your spotlight uniqueness rebounding
off every shiny surface in the theatre
(your mother gives a standing ovation)
I’ll take care of you
I’ll work around your quirks
accept your flair
I’ll smooth over any pitchy parts
while I perfect your language
and you’ll make love look like I don’t need
to heal myself first
you’ll make it look as possible as a beach umbrella
I’ll open any day to shade you
(and would you like sugar in your iced tea?)
you’ll make it look like something I can get behind
like Sophia Loren’s sunglasses
a house on the Mediterranean squinting in one lens
an apartment in Florence in the other
you’ll be Vittorio Gassman
and tell me you like a woman with a little tummy
(a panzettina he said) and I’ll be relieved
even though when you make love I still hide
the desperate shame of that dimpled softness
we’ll make love look like fate
as we settle in the city by the Bay
in a Painted Lady I’ll make shiny new
because our love looks
like a renovated house with a second staircase
slender and practical (another way out)
a clever spiral (our time capsule
nestled behind that Fibonacci wall:
lock of blond hair
chunk of Dolomite from the paternal line
neon lichen unchanged and unchanging
as long as San Andreas will allow
toddlers’ wide-penned drawings
cramped on post-it-sized papers
rolled like cigarettes on a rooftop in Seville
and smoked by a stranger with your name
and a photo of you with the girls
as convincing as Narcissus’ image
in the twisted cylinder)
we’ll make love
look like anticipation even as I am overcome
with thirty-eight weeks of vomit
and only want an inconvenient tomato
a sip of limonata which interrupts your flow
you’ll make it look as safe as bath time and bedtime
as seamless as a father’s kiss and touch
we’ll make love
infrequent but intense and I’ll buy it
even as I wait for Gassman’s other shoe to drop
even as I would have sworn
over your father’s bible this love’s real
we’ll make it look like a cosmopolitan family
with a doting father and summers in Italy
we’ll even live there for a few years
when you’ll make it look like you’ve had quite the life
in America (newly minted blue booklet
among your dual effects)
with time to observe squirrels in the yard
and the roaming flock of wild green parrots
immigrants to Twain’s fog
that feasts on a neighbor’s berries
you’ll be (free) riding that canoe you found
on the river of my undeserving
as my unearned money forks up and over
as it affords me the conductor’s baton
in the pit
of what we’ve staged
as we shake over your house husbandry
and dress it up for the world
and we’ll make love look like I’ve adapted
to your sense of order
as our daughters grow
breasts and wings
you’ll make love look like love reframed
and you’ll punch through the rooms
calling it strangling names
and when I shield them you’ll make love look
like a bull that’s only being a bull and I’m the red cape
and by then you’ll be an expert at making love
look like we agreed
I’m responsible for your wrath
and even then and for a long while yet
we’ll manage to make it
look like a front porch swing
on summer evenings in the Lost Cause South
until those resourceful fireflies start
illuminating their own path
through the humid darkness
Fatherless
you still believe your beguiling words
can do their magic
like my father’s coin trick
quarters toppling out my princess ear
his pocket capable of change
you carry on in ALL CAPS
about the good of the children
about your “win-win” ideas
and invoke your own departed dad
as if you could interpret his message for me
as if the grit of him could reconstitute
billow out of that cold San Miniato urn
like a genie as if
because you’d rubbed the lamp
he would deny me and his grandchildren
as if he would ever have done that
as if your name-calling
would have been anything else to his ear
abracadabra those curses
are transformed into endearments
in your shared tongue as if
as if I’d mistranslated your best efforts
(now it’s convenient to deny
how well I knew your tenses)
to rack our children with shame
kneading it in both hemispheres
and the crevices of their rising sex
as if women aren’t already apologetic
(mound of hair, tender folds
attitude of breast) as if we don’t already yield
enough as you pretend to know what’s best
they’ll be fatherless goes your incantation
and what a terrific loss for them
and something about how you’d never
dishonor me were the roles reversed
(that phrase has a name: Rosalba
and a baby that also ends
in a vowel) win-win window into the father
who writes of his six-year-old’s
“winking come-on”
“Bite my bottom Papà!”
and how he welcomes the occasion to unveil
the word malizia
and attributes this “budding wickedness”
to her (“precocious”) knowing
how he “loves to play
with her intimate parts”
abracadabra
how would the genie of your father
translate that?
because all I hear from his castle of ashes
is that leaving you fatherless
helped break the enchantment
and set us free free FREE
Proxies
for Ilaria, Silvia, Luca, Marco, Evelina, Demetrio, and Angela
The most likable person you know just might be a sociopath.
—Sarah Manguso
adoring
they love you
the version of you
that seems to celebrate them
the version that makes them
feel special because your specialness rubs off
the version that allows them
to doubt themselves a little less
that gives them a sense of purpose
that feeds their need
to be helpful
that believes the image
without further question
the reasonable version of you
that appears to bow down in humility
they can’t smell the false
modesty how it stinks up our kitchen
every time you leave
your smiling lips on the curb
gleaming teeth chewing the dazzled eye
of your bewitched interlocutor
how your proxies feel
their righteousness
even indignation at the injustice I wield
powerful-oh-so-powerful me piloting
armies in your absence
and isn’t it curious
how so many believe my distortions
how my insanity is upheld
by the law
but you are as clever as a fox
you old devil you
stroking your proxies
with that feathery russet tail
(Jemima Puddle-Duck
runs home to get herbs
for the omelet)
dear proxies where were you
when he threw our first born
across the room and stormed
into her ears and lost his voice over it
and later raged at how she pushed him
at three years-old to do it
where were you when he loved
our second daughter so much
he could defend his erections
after their games of tag
and insisted on washing her prepubescence
until it was as sweet as a cherry
where were you when she grew
to disappoint him
when he unwound toilet paper
seized from her bathroom trash
and taped it to the stove vent
to shame her for her waste and womanhood
I don’t remember you there
when he hung a bird by its delicate neck
and added a touch of voodoo
(talon of a second bird knotted
into the fastening anchor at the gable
outside her seventeen-year-old window
such attention to detail
he always claimed to be a miniaturist)
isn’t it a wonder
how the authorities characterize such behavior
on this side of the Atlantic
dear altruistic acquaintances
where were you when he took and took
and took my money all those months ago too
and fled and then demanded more
when he wiled away his time writing manifestos
(those cunning Jews
look what Orwell’s Thought Police are up to)
from his mother’s desk
kind spokespeople please explain
who cared for his precious children then
those children whose father you’ve resurfaced
to defend (how atrocious to keep him from them
these young women who have minds
and memories of their own
these beautiful daughters who now tread
on grown feet through our house without fear)
dear flying monkeys who claim it’s impossible
abuse can be so hidden
impossible it could be as covert
as your own unspoken secrets
as tricky and trickster as the reasons you buttress
a documented abuser
as slippery as what motivates you
to write to me (how dare you)
but I will not scream into your vulnerable ears
I will simply stand at the threshold of truth
and know
Writer-visual artist Lyall Harris’ poetry and prose have appeared in The Minnesota Review, The New Guard, The Raw Art Review, The Dewdrop, High Shelf Press and elsewhere, and her creative nonfiction has been featured in The Montréal Review. Her first book Barrier Island is forthcoming from The Black Spring Press Group. Harris’ poetry has been a finalist in numerous contests and was shortlisted for the 2020 Anne Sexton Poetry Prize and received First Runner-up for the 2020 Doug Draime Prize for Poetry. Harris’ paintings have been widely exhibited and recognized with awards, including The George Hitchcock Prize from the National Academy Museum (NYC), and her book art is held in over fifty Special Collection libraries, such as those at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Yale and Stanford. She holds an MFA in Book Art and Creative Writing from Mills College.
“Contract” is from a current manuscript titled Enough about hidden abuse and what it takes to break free. This poem was born out of my need to understand my role, what I “signed up for,” in the marriage and what I was willing to overlook and accept for so long. It also points to the confusion and denial at the root of my enabling behaviors and to the psychological and financial abuse I tolerated in the relationship.
The relationship “success” an abuser (externally) enjoys hinges on his partner and family keeping the abuse hidden from extended family and friends (abusers often drive wedges over time, bad-talk extended family, etc.), his partner and children, although they may walk on eggshells around him, may be so conditioned that they do not even understand his behavior is abusive. Drawn down the rabbit hole of his pathological thinking and, also, wishing (needing) to please or appease him, they are often made to feel at fault for his behavior and actions. (While I am talking about a heterosexual relationship, these dynamics are not gender-specific.)
His partner (and his children, especially if they are young) has a critical role in his life as a normalizer of him and his behavior: they “dress it up for the world.” Why would any partner do this? Because she (often a caretaker) is in a sort of “shared fantasy” with him, a fantasy based on her own dream for her life as well as an image of her partner she believed to be real. There’s an inevitability to this kind of coupling as the two seem to fit together “perfectly,” a joining otherwise known as “trauma bonding.”
“Fatherless” is from a current manuscript titled Enough about hidden abuse and what it takes to break free, in this case, it (also) took the death of my father-in-law, one of the (unidentified) pillars holding my marriage together.
This poem explores how actions and events in the abuser/narcissist’s life twist and contort in a kind of hall of mirrors so that everything can conform to the abuser’s point of view and thus be convincingly justified (by him). This is a form of manipulation, but because it comes naturally to the abuser and because he has no ability to take in any perspective other than his own, he fully believes the skewed reality he creates and relentlessly promotes. The abuser’s ability to impose these distortions on his family can be masterful, especially if he is charismatic, creative, and intelligent, and this process can happen slowly, over many years. In this way, abuse, especially psychological abuse, can be insidious, slippery, and confusing. To add to the confusion, this kind of abuser intermittently also appears very “loving” (known as “love bombing”). Often there are other forms of abuse and/or deception that he actively hides (but, naturally, also justifies).
It is possible to finally wake up from the trance and understand (learn) that what he’s been calling by a hundred other names—“respect,” “rules,” “morality,” “duty,” “education,” “love,” “innocent play”—is abuse. Then, you can stop enabling his psychosis. And everything will change—who you thought you were, who you thought he was, what you thought you were protecting (keeping the family together); your identity will undergo a death, but it is possible to find yourself—the whole of you—on the other side of it and you can build an integrated life, a life in which your children are also set free.
Psychologist Sam Vaknin coined the term “flying monkeys” (borrowed from The Wizard of Oz) in the context of narcissistic abuse to refer to the narcissist’s “friends” who do his bidding (rumor-spreading, shaming and blaming, etc.), particularly after a break-up. There’s a term for it because the abuser’s successful recruitment of “flying monkeys” is so predictable, it’s part of the pattern of this pathology. The abuser’s victimhood can be extremely convincing (his life literally depends on it: without his false reality, he would be faced with who he really is). Many “flying monkeys” are unknowing do-gooders, especially vulnerable to this kind of manipulation (and this category of “flying monkeys,” although infuriating, can thus be forgiven for their shortsightedness); some, on the other hand, are also themselves abusers.
There’s no point in responding to the “flying monkeys” or trying to educate them; many are often the most dedicated (and gullible) devotees of the abuser. In addition to being a convincing victim, the narcissist is an expert at selectively making others feel good, his beam of light can be powerful indeed. (It should be noted that extricating oneself from a relationship with “Cluster B” personality disordered people shares many steps with cult deprogramming.) Fortunately, many people have healthy boundaries and would never engage in this kind of inappropriate “flying monkey” behavior; this poem is dedicated to those who don’t have such boundaries, to the authors of the many “flying monkey” letters I received.
“Proxies” is from a current manuscript titled Enough about hidden abuse and what it takes to break free.