Dominance by Ken Poyner

She tends garden with thumb and forefinger,

Carrying excess with her like a furious fertilizer.

The bend of her shadow-weary body arches

Consistently down, attention to the soil.

All day she looks for wonderful rags

That will skip along the kitchen floor

Without sticking, yet still lick the tile clean.

Her cooking is less than sumptuous, but keeps

The man alive, and minimizes the clutch of leftovers

That become compost.  In his bed she is not by half

As feral or torrential as he would like,

But she cautiously folds herself into comfortable submission

And can be easily kissed in outline, or crossly held,

Or turned and majestically posed,

Bearing up well – even, at unexpected times, unwillingly

Catching her breath.  She counts the days between

The washing of curtains, the beating of rugs.  Mornings,

She pats meticulously out of the unassuming sheets and covers

Any ambivalence at her having been there:  a presence,

Ghostly, as thin as praise, but still functioning in all particulars.

This is the task that makes her wonder

Most.  As the night before, he slept and she idly thought

I can do at this moment as I wish, with no one to keep me

Leashed or withheld or buttoned-close:  I can do

As I have a will to do; but rather

Than take freedom, she waits,

The heart of purpose and pattern and place,

Even as the gift of release never comes,

Even as she grows to love the hate of the man,

Even as she grows to hate the love of the man.

Ken Poyner’s collections of brief fictions, “Constant Animals” and “Avenging Cartography”, as well as poetry ”The Book of Robot” and “Victims of a Failed Civics”, can be located through links at www.barkingmoosepress.com.    He has had recent work out in “Analog”, “Asimov’s”, “Café Irreal”, and other places, both print and web.