Milk and Honey

“The Loving” details the sexual awakening of the speaker, who at the end of the previous section was fearful of intimate touch. The way for this change of heart is paved by the speaker’s change of attitude toward her parents, who now appear more supportive and loving. The father connects his wife’s pregnancy to the divine: It is “the closest thing to god on this earth” (37). The mother insists that her daughter’s future husband should be aspirationally good: “the type / of man I’d want to raise my son to be like” (39). 

However, the speaker still hungers for love and affection in ways that are not always beneficial. In an allusion to karmic causality, a core tenet of Hinduism, the speaker sees this relationship as a reward for what she suffered earlier: “love will play no games / cause love knows life / has been hard enough already” (52). When she starts a significant romantic relationship, she prioritizes his sexual pleasure: “every revolution / starts and ends / with his lips” (40). She puts her lover on a pedestal as “every hope / i’ve ever had / in human form” (41)—hyperbole that foreshadows disappointment, since no one could live up to this standard. In imagery that combines epic heroics with sexual prowess, she describes him as “bring[ing] / the sun to its / knees every / night” (43). The fact that he loves her mind and is interested in getting to know her thoughts and feelings “before reaching / for my waist” (46) gains her trust. Her desire grows and they engage in sexual acts. 

The speaker ignores several red flags. First, her lover warns, “i am not an easy person to want” (48). She also realizes that the relationship is silencing her just as she was silenced earlier in “The Hurting,” although this time around, it is through sexual pleasure: “you make my / tongue so weak it forgets / what language to speak in” (53). This is exacerbated a short while later in a similar poem, where the lover tells her “you talk too much […] i can think of better ways to use that mouth” (60). 

After a period of happiness, the speaker is “so soft i turn into / running water” (57); the image connects her to the milk-like women of the collection’s title, but also clarifies her newfound lack of solidity and strength. While this man “gives / exactly what i need / before i even know i need it” and “hears me / even when i do not speak” (66), she is using their sexual connection to ignore fissures in the relationship. 

In the final poem of “The Loving,” a prose poem, the couple is no longer blissful: The speaker states, “[W]e’ve been arguing more than we ought to” (68), and he whispers another woman’s name in his sleep. They fight so ferociously that the neighbors are concerned and call the fire department. The speaker has a limited toolkit for addressing the relationship’s collapse; she initiates passionate sex, so that “fire trucks come rolling in to save us but they can’t distinguish whether these flames began with our anger or our passion” (69). 

This sets up the central conflict of the next section: The speaker cannot differentiate between anger and passion, much like she warns the fathers in “The Hurting.” Past behavior causes this daughter “to confuse anger with kindness” (11). While the sex between the speaker and her lover is consensual, it is not healthy.