What if I met my divorce again

by Tina Posner

and it was a lion in a zoo—
one I accidentally enraged.
Her name is Ophelia. I got clever
and she gave me goosebumps.
This was a clean transaction.
The communication came across.
Lying isn’t what a lion does.
She didn’t like it when I hid behind
the wooden fence and reappeared
like a predator’s predator.

A carnivore caught my first
marriage. It was weak or sick.
We fought over the corpse,
danced around it in a kind of ceremony,
made it live as a zombie for a bit.
We carried on like carrion.
A lion has no patience for that.
Love is alive or it isn’t.
You are either a lion or you’re food.
Food doesn’t pretend to be a predator.

Naming a lion “Ophelia” makes me question
my reading of Hamlet. I imagined
Ophelia’s hunger as anorexic.
Anger is either a lion or a cancer.
My ex was a Cancer and a liar,
hiding his empties. My anger fed
on ellipses—my body language
told its own kind of lie.

I didn’t sink under wet flowers
but drank like a fish as bartenders
kept knocking: one screwdriver
after another. It wasn’t made
with juice but an orange powder mix,
the mid-century drink of astronauts.
The emptiness between planets
is what it feels like when a marriage dies.
But no one holds a funeral.
We cried over the paperwork
and moved on to new partners.

But even now I can feel the pores
pucker all over my body—
an involuntary response to
that lion’s roar. It lives in
a private zoo, and somewhere
a PETA protester is cursing its owner.
Ophelia looks well but isn’t free.
Two fences bind a shared memory.
What devoured our love is safe to visit now.