Lori Davis "The Same Story Without the Weapon" from White Dime

For Day 23 of Poetry Month, here's a poem from Lori Davis' book White Dime. 

When it came out, White Dime was one of my hard-edged favorites for a hard-edged year.  The poem "Caring for Your Spider Plant" was a classic about the toxic romanticism of parenting. The epigraph about Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children, sets the context for a culture with policies that burdens future generations with environmental disaster, a huge national debt and multilateral destruction as a cultural values. Well worth the read if you can find a copy.

Davis has a dark sense of humor in some of her best poems like "How To Relax While Making Love" or  "The Same Story Without the Weapon" from White Dime

Pretend for the moment there is no knife in his hand.
This way you won't worry when he compliments
her necklace or suggests they go walking together, 

down a stairway, into an alcove she can't see into.
Even if without the knife, he gets right to the point.
Holds out his fist, as if to appropriate something. 

He tells her to take off her pants. Is he kidding?
She never learned alleys are like rickety bridges.
She giggles and says no. but senses something 

mandatory about this man. He takes his words
and pushes them up against the pale of her neck.
From a distance, they look like two old friends, 

reuniting, but if you stood closer you'd hear him
hiss quiet bitch in her ear. No, she says. Period.
That she has her period. And like so many men, 

he believes her, immediately. She wonders why
he hasn't leaned how to hug without crushing
a girl's toes or how to look a woman in the eye 

without liquefying her insides. Ok, let's pretend
for a moment, the knife has been here all along.
Unforgiving and lethal. This time it's in her hand.