I’ve known little bitches
like her all my life,
their noses and butts stuck
so high in the air
you’d think St. Peter
himself had goosed her.

Haven’t I seen her mooning
after the fathers like a kitten
wanting nothing but milk
and to try its claws on something?

And me on my knees all day,
scrubbing and praying,
and my man dead
these twenty years
and no one to fill his side
of the bed, not that he was there
so often—lapping beer
and the tarts like a tom cat
gone to fornicator’s heaven.

I’d have made Father Kriek
a fine sister, I would,
saved the breasts of the chicken,
the prime of the roast for him,
then sat with him, knitting
with just one lamp on,
to give the parlor a cozy glow
while he read, or sipped something
cultured, like sherry.Then he’d kiss my forehead
and climb the stairs, prayer
the last thing he did
before closing his eyes.

Can’t I see him there now,
his hands crossed on his chest,not a drop of sweat on him
on even the hottest nights,
while I made sure
everything was tight and snug below.

*

Robert Cooperman’s latest collections are Draft Board Blues and City Hat Frame Factory. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. My Shtetl won the Holland Prize from Logan House Books. Forthcoming from Aldrich Press is Their Wars. “Mrs. Lynch Talks of Mary McCormick, the Girl Who Accused Three Priests of Seducing Her” was originally published in TLR: Winter 1989, and republished in TLR: Current Events, the 60th Anniversary Issue