I
When in a farmhouse kitchen that smelled of old rinds and wet cigarette butts I hoisted the shotgun to my shoulder and aimed but did not fire it at the man who had just taken my virginity like a snack, with my collusion, but still —
When I sat in a conference room in an inquisition at the “newspaper of record,” across from the one slurping his pipe, the one arching her eyebrow, and I felt the heat like a wet brand in my chest, repaid insult for insult and left their fancy job like a squashed bug on the floor —
When I was twelve, too old, the last time my father spanked me, pants down, because I had “distressed” my mother and my vision went red-black and I did not forgive —
When, during my travels along the Gulf Coast, the intruder returned in the night and I did not call the cops again but stood with a butcher knife facing the door, yelling, “Come in!” although this time it was just the wind flapping and banging the screen door —
When across a skating-rink-sized glistening table I told the committee chair and her brooch I was a fan of Marx and lost the fellowship —
When I threw a pot of hot coffee and it just missed a man’s head, and the black-brown spatter stains were still there four years later long after he’d left me when I finally moved out of that East Village hole —
II
I would have had to be thinking in order to have thought — loaded, not loaded? — and I was not thinking, I was only dripping hot and oh the pleasure, I can still feel its prickling, crackle over the furnace of my rage, to see his face go pale, his eyes widen, his “put it down, put it down” — and I put it down and allowed my life as well as his to go on.
III
I miss my anger. Decades go by when all I can muster is absent-minded invective, you know, directed at the news; or a brief fantasy of shoving someone in front of a bus. Yesterday I slammed my fist on my desk and then apologized, to the desk.
Consider the tapestry of the seven deadly sins, at Saint-Denis: Anger, wild-haired and half-dressed, picked out in blue and silver thread bunched against the crimson, rough against the fingertips, she rides a black boar dappled with blood and waves her double-headed axe —
Yes, I remember her. I always lie when I always say I didn’t know the gun was loaded.
"Anger", April Bernard
