The Lover's Complaint

I loved a man once. He used to be in the military. One day he went bonkers when he thought I was looking at another man. He killed my dog and then stabbed me right outside my mother’s house. He’s in prison now, making dangerous connections. Every week he sends me a letter in which he says he’s going to kill me because I am a whore. He gets out in three weeks. The police won’t help me because when I was seventeen I was arrested for prostitution. Oh love! What labor it is to lose the thing we had not; what witchcraft lies in the orb of a woman’s particular tear; etc. etc.