The Details

‘This is not the life I signed up for.”

She said it with

clenched teeth to hold back dragon breath,

squinted eyes to hold back lava tears,

fists tight to hold back futile gestures.

“Where is that paper with the details?”

She began

turning over the house,

taking one leftover project

after another

and heaving them towards the garbage can.

Dried up paints that meant well.

Why did everything always “mean well”?

Fragile flowers that dropped brown petals

with the slightest touch.

Piles upon piles of a dead woman’s colorful felt.

Artists are sick people, keeping gifts locked in boxes.

Flirting but never once going all the way.

“I am NOT a sick person,”

she hissed.

“I’ve just misplaced my certificate,

the one with the details.”

“Please, please don’t pat my back,”

she begged of them.

“And not my head either,”

she pleaded of them

For she’d been so well patted

her skin had become thick

and she so badly wanted to bleed.

She was the forgotten,

the one for which Pass-over

was not a reward, but an abandonment

a newly ushered in parliament

a sucking oxygen out of her environment.

She was the silenced,

the one who wore muzzles as a fashion statement

before she realized that they bruised her cheeks

and messed up her make-up

and set her heart to stuttering.

She was the trapped,

doomed to live out a series of choices

she had made while still asleep.

Counting the days off like a prison sentence

etching the stone wall in abhorrence

with tally marks in a cadence

made by broken fingernails.

But she was not broken.

She just had to find the document,

the one with the details.

So she kept searching.

Through a bookshelf of stories,

each one more frivolous than the volume before it.

They fell on her, pinned her to the ground with

unkept promises and false realties and

fantastical doorways in which every door was locked.

She closed her eyes and saw a field

with greener grass, and forbidden fruit, the kind she’d been warned about.

And the grass said, “Come.”

And the woman screamed, “I can’t, until I find my documentation,

the one with the details.”