A Toxic Woman

“Tom laughed at the phrase "sexual deviation." Where was the sex? Where was the deviation? He looked at Freddie and said low and bitterly: "Freddie Miles, you're a victim of your own dirty mind.”
- Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I first fell in love with a toxic woman
when I was fifteen years old
and in the "crime" section of my local library.

her name was Patricia,
her name on the spine of a book
called This Sweet Sickness,

about a clever scientist
who's stupidly in love
with a woman from his youth,
so much that he's bought her a house in the woods,

though she doesn't

know it

yet...

the gate marked HIGHSMITH was opened
and soon I was in
amongst the villains of her dreams,
the diseases that tasted like strawberry wine,
the pus that smelled of fresh daisies.

learning of her vileness,
my Patricia ascended even higher in my heart,
at an age when my mother was warning me
about girls who aren't what they seem,
who draw you in with girlish charms
then break you like a predator.

but I couldn't give up my Miss Highsmith,
even if her handbag writhed with pet snails.
even when she drank and smoked
and talked about girlfriends she'd hurt;
and even when she'd take out her flick-knife
and wave it in my face.
especially, in fact.

we had our kinks, like anyone,
the black handcuffs
that mark the spines of crime novels,

and in her books themselves
the line indelible between
love made and slaughtered like a beast.

suburban swimming pools in which
are a man and his wife's lover,
the former fellow's hand reaching to stroke
the latter's neck, before grabbing his throat
and pushing him under the waves...

I remember my father sneering at you, Patricia...
wondering why I’d like a girl I couldn’t break.
I told him you’re a dyke because, of course,
you were, just as I was queer.
This satisfied him. And so he looked the other way
while we made love in other ways,
undivided by respective gaynesses.
Me running a hand across
the thick cords of your turtlenecks,
to rest in your bob of black hair.
You smiling through fumes of cannabis,
enjoying the cry of an owl, the tremor of a forgery,

a freakishness to tame Ripley.