"Letter to My First Husband" is contained in my forthcoming book: The Marriage Manual: Poems (Backroom Window Press, 2024). Advance praise for the book: To read McCauley Freeman’s The Marriage Manual is to follow an honest inquiry wrought deftly over fifty poems. Never does this collection sink into sour, nor does it soar too sweetly. There’s a light touch that rings like a small bell, gently. The book opens with the query, “Why did we believe?” We’re drawn to ask ourselves what the promise of lifelong love is. Or isn’t. The complications of the narrator’s first marriage reveal themselves in lines of nestled warmth, “In the crook of your arm, /entrapped.” This pairing of affection and pain squeezes, like the wife who “couldn’t fit/into the smaller places anymore.” When the author finds her second husband, a quiet intimacy unfolds, “you paused/to untangle me, your fingers/brushing softly against my face”. We never doubt these poems; their knotted beauty lingers. Read The Marriage Manual and enter love in all its incarnations.
Thanks everyone! My book, The Marriage Manual by Linda McCauley Freeman, from which this poem was taken is just out from Backroom Window Press and is now available on Amazon!
Lovely.
"Letter to My First Husband" is contained in my forthcoming book: The Marriage Manual: Poems (Backroom Window Press, 2024). Advance praise for the book: To read McCauley Freeman’s The Marriage Manual is to follow an honest inquiry wrought deftly over fifty poems. Never does this collection sink into sour, nor does it soar too sweetly. There’s a light touch that rings like a small bell, gently. The book opens with the query, “Why did we believe?” We’re drawn to ask ourselves what the promise of lifelong love is. Or isn’t. The complications of the narrator’s first marriage reveal themselves in lines of nestled warmth, “In the crook of your arm, /entrapped.” This pairing of affection and pain squeezes, like the wife who “couldn’t fit/into the smaller places anymore.” When the author finds her second husband, a quiet intimacy unfolds, “you paused/to untangle me, your fingers/brushing softly against my face”. We never doubt these poems; their knotted beauty lingers. Read The Marriage Manual and enter love in all its incarnations.
Three of the lines that are most telling for me and my very favorite are: "the fairground replaced
by a shopping mall," "we both were forever leaving from the start" and " how I never
turned to not caring." I appreciate and understand the vulnerability of this poem and its narrator. So many of us can insert ourselves in her shoes.
Thanks everyone! My book, The Marriage Manual by Linda McCauley Freeman, from which this poem was taken is just out from Backroom Window Press and is now available on Amazon!