A Sexual History: Have You Felt Coerced to Do Anything Sexually?
How to explain the lessening of days,
subtraction of minutes, my rage
when, while I feed the children and do dishes,
he runs an hour along the embankment,
or, later, dozes to CNN, flicker of disaster on his chest,
but wakes me with his insomnia at 3 a.m.,
and we have sex which feels like only sex,
my body just the one beside his?
You keep a petty account, he says.
The children flinch at my voice. I weep in the closet.
We’re years past him tidying his apartment,
watching my lips, sweeping his fingers over them,
how we slept, clothed, lulled
by one another’s closeness, clasping and
loosing, only to reach again
for a waist, a neck.
Still, I refuse this abatement, refuse sex
because it ravages judgment, intimates rapprochement.
Let’s fly to Paris, I say. Or,
We could see a therapist.
What if I’m too far gone?
I want my children, and how he cradles them,
two decades of common hours, places,
a language of hands and half-sentences,
I want this home and
the one of which we’ve dreamt.
Passive nakedness is the easiest lie, the swiftest line
to forgiveness: Yes, I sigh,
Yes, and he is grateful as he is
for nothing, his cock stiff as
absolute allegiance, and we fall grasping
past the kissless void, pressing in,
and just his hand on my clit, how he says,
Look at me when you come, and
I will, I am.
Oh god, oh me—
I won’t, I tell myself,
I won’t again.
subtraction of minutes, my rage
when, while I feed the children and do dishes,
he runs an hour along the embankment,
or, later, dozes to CNN, flicker of disaster on his chest,
but wakes me with his insomnia at 3 a.m.,
and we have sex which feels like only sex,
my body just the one beside his?
You keep a petty account, he says.
The children flinch at my voice. I weep in the closet.
We’re years past him tidying his apartment,
watching my lips, sweeping his fingers over them,
how we slept, clothed, lulled
by one another’s closeness, clasping and
loosing, only to reach again
for a waist, a neck.
Still, I refuse this abatement, refuse sex
because it ravages judgment, intimates rapprochement.
Let’s fly to Paris, I say. Or,
We could see a therapist.
What if I’m too far gone?
I want my children, and how he cradles them,
two decades of common hours, places,
a language of hands and half-sentences,
I want this home and
the one of which we’ve dreamt.
Passive nakedness is the easiest lie, the swiftest line
to forgiveness: Yes, I sigh,
Yes, and he is grateful as he is
for nothing, his cock stiff as
absolute allegiance, and we fall grasping
past the kissless void, pressing in,
and just his hand on my clit, how he says,
Look at me when you come, and
I will, I am.
Oh god, oh me—
I won’t, I tell myself,
I won’t again.
September 2025
Anemone Beaulier’s poetry and essays have been published by Cave Wall, Columbia Journal, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Southern Review, and others. Originally from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with her husband and children.
Art: Ellen June Wright, Diptych #1306, #1509, watercolor on paper