Heather Treseler
Art by Linda Stojak
Linda Stojak - Untitled: White Dress with Red Line, 2022
Oil on canvas, 72" x 48"
Some Women Marry Houses
Anne Sexton’s house, in my hometown,
is still margarine yellow with blue shutters,
a square Colonial sensible as a durable shoe
on a quiet road abutting woods, its front lawn
gracious as a lap smoothed within an inch
of perfection: Nature, duly fertilized, hedged
and bedded, weekly trimmed, a prelude
to the garden of garters and stays, silky
slips—garments meant to seduce, contain,
or govern the approach to bounty,
feminine reward, what awaited men
in their return from the capital wars.
To live in a rectangular fashion, guided by
right angles, in rooms assigned functions:
a tidy house keeping mum about its
lusts and layaways, its pang, its plan.
To play croquet beside the flagstone
patio, wielding mallets, nudging balls
inside all the pretty little wickets—
while the flank steaks sizzle and pop
in their own blood juice and the martini
pitcher perspires along its long glass handle
as the afternoon marinates in a pointed jest,
subtle rebuke, something edging to break loose.
Linda Stojak - Untitled: (White dress), 2021
Oil on canvas, 72" x 48"
Hitchcock in East End
The feel of meat between the teeth
soothed his panic or flavored it—
the night he woke from sleep
and found his parents not
at home, no note or neighbor
with news of their whereabouts,
no siren or scene of disorder:
kitten heels, derby hat missing
from the closet. With bovine
violence, he caromed into
the galley kitchen, began
eating slice after slice of deli
meat, corned beef and tongue,
something to assure himself
he was animal, boy, creature
who eats another: teeth gnawing
grist and grease, devouring fear
before it consumes, proving himself
Alfred—pale in an icebox’s fluorescent
glare, its celluloid square of light.
Linda Stojak - Untitled: (Yellow Coat), 2021
Oil on canvas, 60" x 60"
The Sitter
Good with kids and stubborn
stroller wheels, I knew never
to futz with a gas furnace
or disposal—learned the rules
of macrobiotic, Kosher, nut-free
kitchens. Epi-pens, tourniquets,
Heimlich maneuver. And when
they came home late, a little drunk
or smudgy around the mouth
to their children’s guardian, propped
up on Coca-Cola, in those years that
other people’s lives (and television)
split my infinitives into participles
of unknowing: gratefully, I took
crisp bills and the father’s chivalrous
offer to walk me home in the dark
that smelled of leaf rot, chance
of rain, tired cologne as he edged
in close. Sudden grip, then grope—
a swan dive and mouth over mine,
forced open to a salty tongue
while he held me against a hardened
cock. Rumor, in Virgil, is a wild
monstrous bird that ravages
the hand that feeds it. So I never
spoke of the soft assault. Or Susan’s
diet of grapefruit and gin, the devout
Mc Kinnons’ “family size” box
of rubbers or Jules, the single dad,
whose Parisian airs were French
Canadian. Yet I saw Roz’s forearm
bruises. Shelby’s cupboards taped
against bulimic urges. Toy handcuffs
tucked behind a laundry bin, and looks
that lingered past innocence; a silence,
among women, like an understanding.
I smelled guano and rotten fruit inside
that gated street, that quaint rookery
in Eighties Eden. Something rustled
in the chimney, on the roof. Someone
was gathering proof. In time, the truth
would let fly; I stayed quiet, waiting.
Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition (2020), which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook award. Her work appears in the American Scholar, Harvard Review, and the Iowa Review, among other journals, and her poem “Wildlife” won the 2021 Yeats Poetry Prize. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.
Linda Stojak
Linda Stojak (b. 1955) received her MFA from Pratt Institute, and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a Leeway Grant, a Distinguished Achievement Award from Arcadia University, and a residency in Toblach, Italy. Her work has been reviewed and discussed in numerous publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Riot Material, Art in America, and ARTnews; and is represented in over 300 private collections, as well as in public collections including the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Seattle University, and the Harn Museum of Art. She lives and works in Philadelphia.