"A Guest at Their Table" by Talia Bloch
I arrived a spy among them,
hungry for their ways,
my path obscured by birth.
Listen, I said, with my valise at my side.
Listen, I said, with my valise threatening
to burst open and spill its sorrow.
Listen, what can I do?
I wore their uniform:
the considered jacket, the fitting slacks,
the makeup made to look like skin,
the curated smile and set gestures.
They invited me into their homes,
sat me at their tables and fed me their food.
They shared their possessions. They shared
their friends, their stories, their children.
I laughed with them. I wept.
For three months I lived among them
in the room they provided with its bed
and its table and its closet not for hiding.
Then, one morning, I told them
about the strange animal living in my throat.
How it grazed behind my lungs. How it roamed
my body like a field, nuzzling about
the grass for a good place to rest.
They did not reply. At night, she appeared,
halfway between mother and monster,
halfway between the door and bed. She told me
what to say and what not. And I burrowed
into my blankets and fell into a blank sleep.
Sorry, I said when they came to wake me
the next morning. Sorry, I said. Although a spy
is never supposed to say sorry. Sorry, although
no one is supposed to say sorry, ever. Sorry.
They looked through me then
to my awkward skin and widened eyes,
to my pooling thoughts and disheveled hair.
My mouth emptied out. My muscles stiffened.
My mind became a hollow
they couldn’t fathom, and their talk
echoed in my empty core.
I became a statue cast in iron,
and they transported me out
to a small square at the edge of town.
Here I am. Daily, the birds come to visit.
They cover me with song. They cover me
with droppings. Some days, a stranger
comes by and sits at my base, where they put
the useless plaque: “She was someone else.”
Talia Bloch is the author of the collection Inheritance (Gold Wake Press). Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, The Southern Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her work was awarded an Editor’s Prize by Pleiades, was a finalist for the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and was selected for Best Short Fictions 2020.
