My husband has abandoned me.

He told his mother I gave this to him,
.                                 that I dishonored him while he was away,
.                                 sweating in the dark while he toiled in the earth.
He was sick, from the mines,
.       from the damp below the ground,
.                from the bunkhouse,
.                         from bad food and water.
Not from the girls. There were girls,
he told his mother, but he was a man.
.                                 They were not me, he told his mother.
She understood him. It could not have been them,
he loved only me; I was the only woman that he saw more than once.
.                                         Only I could do this to him.

My father came to me once after I had been to hospital.
He stood in the door and shouted to the village: This is my daughter.
.                                                                            This is my shame.

Shunned by my father, by my neighbors,
I am afraid of giving the disease to my family—
.                                 especially to my youngest brother who is so small.
.                                 I do not touch him; I do not hold him in my arms.

My home for now is with my brother and his wife.
.               They have no children. I am not to eat from the same plates;
.                       I have a plastic cup and spoon and am made to sleep
.                                                                                in the kitchen.

I have been sent to them to die. It is the most shameful death.

–E. K. Mortenson,
The Fifteenth Station (2012)
Accents Publishing

E. K. Mortenson is the author of a chapbook, Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010), and a full-length collection, What Wakes Us (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming). His work also appears in both print and online journals and anthologies. He was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and is poetry editor at Kugelmass: A Journal of Literary Humor. He writes and teaches in Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and two children.