Arias by Sharon Olds

Author:Sharon Olds
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dream of Mrs. Sly

Mrs. Sly, my first-grade teacher—

who told my mother, near my ear, I should be

spanked every day, as soon as I woke up,

before I had a chance to do anything—

would be sitting in my mother’s driveway, on my mother’s

Hitchcock chair, the one she tied me

to. The drive was overlooked

by Mrs. Baldwin’s upper windows,

and Judge MacBain’s—so Mrs. Sly

could be seen by the neighbors, wearing a billowy

nightie, a chiffon negligee,

and her breasts were outside it, horizontal, they were

undulating out,

in front of her,

on the air, as if resting on the swells and dips

of a creek—they were two feet long, whitish,

rippled like ribbon worms. And I was lying

across her lap, and she was rubbing salve

into my poor embarrassed enema-

hole. I hadn’t heard of semen,

I didn’t even know I had a girl opening,

but in that recurrent nightmare Mrs.

Sly was doing what she wanted with me.

Now I wonder if I’d liked something

about it—everything about it, my bottom

mooning the neighbors, the slippery goo,

the absence of pain. Mrs. Sly

was handsome, around 4' 11",

and wore spike heels to teach first grade.

I felt she hated me. My mother

did not hate me. She did unto me

nothing that had not been done

unto her, and she did not drive me crazy,

but just into certain corners of the human:

desire, exposure, shame, arousal—

and an unguent with millions of tiny people in it.

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