Marianna Staroselsky
Wretch-a-sketch

I’ll send you to Camus and Dostoyevsky.
You can find your liver and mummified Maman
in their closets: curt sentences, as isolated
and futile as your understanding of women.

I’ll diagnose you with oil painting.
You’ll carve open my brain
to harvest red dye for my Sahara sun.

The Halloween between us is deep:
cor-de-laranja flesh, pulpy and round.
A moon—a seeming depth, a moan,
a beast, a breast.

We ache to ache, poor cultured rats.
We spew to spew, groan to believe
a span of sound will give the end punctuation.

_ _

Marianna Staroselsky is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

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