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When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Lynn Melnick

You can only hear you look like a hooker so many times
before you become one. Spandex was really big

the year I stopped believing.
I babysat for the rabbi’s son, Isaac. There was luxe carpet

in every room of the condo. Isaac liked Legos
and we made a pasture and a patriarch and lots of wives.

In his car in his garage the rabbi handed me a self-help book
and put my hand on his crotch, ready to go.

I didn’t care.
I made good money.

Isaac lived to be 180 according to the bible.
Isaac is the only patriarch who didn’t have concubines.

Isaac is 30 now. Modern scholarship tells us

the patriarchs never existed. Experience taught me
the patriarchs are all we’ve got.

Lynn Melnick is the author of Landscape with Sex and Violence (YesYes Books, 2017) and If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012).

About Lynn Melnick

Occasion

Women's History Month

Themes

About this Poem

“The poem takes its title from the best-selling 1981 self-help book by Harold Kushner. I wrote this poem during my fellowship year at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. I had come to the center with the plan to write into my Jewish heritage and my feelings about it, which is some of what I'm doing in this poem, but I also found myself thinking a lot about patriarchy and rape culture—the things I am always thinking about—and thinking in particular about the ways in which I've sold my body to men. The speaker here is a much younger me trying to figure out how to survive inside a rape culture of which she’s just becoming aware and which is seemingly everywhere and endless—and we’re both feeling pretty defeated by it.”
—Lynn Melnick

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Landscape with Written Statement

You wrap my ribs in gauze—
an experiment with the word tenderly

after your hands left my throat too bruised to speak.

While winter sun squints at the ghost flower
dying in its shabby terra cotta

far from home

men tell me to be honest about my role in the incident:

Lynn Melnick

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Losing the Narrative

A shattered bottle tore through my hand last month and split

a vein until every finger was purple and I couldn’t

make even a tentative fist.

Lynn Melnick

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Landscape with Clinic and Oracle

Maybe you’re not the featherweight champ
of all the cutthroat combat sports

(fifteen and pregnant
again)

but you’d convert your ring corner
into a slaughterhouse

before you’d inquire after human kindness.

In the humdrum flare outside the clinic
you wait for a ride, feel the spill at the tipping point

trickle down your inner thigh
as you bask in the post-industrial particulate

on your skin, ash
into a jasmine pot’s bituminous anchorage

Lynn Melnick

2016

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When Bad Things Happen to Good People

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