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TEMPTATIONS
I suspected my wife was having an affair
when I found some whips and chains hidden
in an old suitcase in our closet. We had never tried
S/M and she always fainted at the sight
of blood. These implements were medieval—
made of goat leather and iron ore. I found books,
magazines, and videos on body piercing--
the Prince Albert, the Ampallang, the Apadravya.
I would come home from work and she would have
a satisfied glow about her--a spiritual smug smile.
To catch her in the act I chose a Friday afternoon
to come home early--no strange car in the driveway,
no sign of forced entry. As I made my way upstairs
to our master bedroom, I heard the sound of leather
hitting flesh and my wife screaming “Oh Jesus! Yes!
Sweet Jesus! Yes! Don’t make me stop!”
The door was left ajar so I peeked inside—
a man with dark hair down to his shoulders was naked
and my wife was giving him serious lashes.
I didn’t know what to think, I felt rage, betrayed,
and a tinge of denial. Then, they assumed a missionary
position and the weirdest thing happened—
they began to levitate off the bed
just like that scene with Linda Blair in The Exorcist
My wife’s moans were getting deeper and longer.
I began to rationalize everything,
made myself think that my wife was being attacked
by some supernatural demon, an incubus,
or by Beelzebub himself. I reached for a weapon,
found our heavy silver-plated crucifix
from the hallway and I burst in on them.
They crashed back to the mattress
with a loud thud. I could not resist the rage
and I began hammering at his feet.
Poem
© Nick Carbo 2004. All rights reserved.
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Nick
Carbó is the author of El Grupo McDonald's (1995) and Secret Asian Man
(2000), which won the Asian American Literary Award. He is the editor of
three anthologies of Filipino literature: Pinoy Poetics (2004),
Babaylan (2000), and Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1995). With poet
Denise Duhamel he co-edited the anthology, Sweet Jesus (2002). He's won
numerous awards, grants (National Endowment for the Arts, the New
York Foundation for the Arts 1999) and residencies (Fundacion Valparaiso,
Spain; Le Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland; the MacDowell Colony,
and Yaddo). He was Visiting Poet in the MFA program in Poetry at Columbia
College, Chicago this Spring. He keeps a blog called the
Carbonator.
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Portrait
of Nick Carbo © Henry Denander 2004. All rights reserved.
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