First Wife

1:1

This is the version no one tells at synagogue, she was made from the same dirt as him, not a rib or an afterthought and when he wanted her beneath him, only beneath him, she said his name once, wrong on purpose, and left through the air, just like that. I think about this a lot when I am asked to lie still. I think about this in the exact shape of a woman lying still.

1:2

The men who wrote her down couldn't decide what to call the leaving. Some said demon, some, night-hag, they said she comes for infants, she hangs an amulet. So say the names of angels at the doorframe, keep her out. Sit with me and let’s marvel at how fast a woman's freedom gets rewritten as an appetite for children, because the only thing a woman could want, once ungoverned, is harm.

1:3

My mother hung nothing at my door but she said it with her hands anyway; “sit up straight, cross your legs, don't let them see you want something.” No name existed for the wanting, obviously. But it lived low in me like a second spine, and that keeping it down took more of me than school, or sleep could, than any of the things I was supposed to be tired from at that age.

1:4

I left my marriage on an ordinary Tuesday, no wings, no sulfur, just a duffel bag and a made-up decision. My husband asked what he'd done wrong, and I understood, watching his face, that he needed it to be a wrong, needed a reason, because the thought that I simply stopped agreeing to be beneath him had no name ascribed to it yet. I didn't give him one. I let him name it whatever helped him sleep well at night.

1:5

They say Lilith still comes to riverbanks and still argues with angels, still refuses the return they keep offering her in exchange for a hundred dead children a day, a bargain she says no to, every time, forever. I think about her out past the edge of the story, and the part where the men had stopped writing. Doing what exactly? floating, or working, or laughing with no one watching her do it.

Adam, did you dare miss the shape of a woman who wouldn't lie down?

Call her monster because ungovernable wasn't in your mouth yet?

Do you ever wonder where she went, where she is?

Was it really so far from you?

Writer’s Bio

Robin Petersen is a writer and educator, and the author of three poetry collections: Where the Winds Stops, Christ, Wake up, and chapbook: Go, Matter, Go.

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