After the Witch Hunt
By Megan Falley
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How Poetry Can Change Your Heart Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Redhead and the Slaughter King Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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After the Witch Hunt - Megan Falley
Book
IF YOU REALLY LOVE A WRITER
"How vain it is to sit down to write
when you have not stood up to live."
—Henry David Thoreau
Everyone wants to give a writer the perfect notebook. Over the years I’ve acquired stacks: one is leather, a rope of Rapunzel’s hair braids its spine. Another is tree-friendly, its paper reincarnated from diaries of poets now graying in cubicles. One is small and black as a funeral dress, its pages lined like the hands of a widow. There’s even a furry blue one that looks like a shag rug or a monster that would hide beneath it—and I wonder why? For every blown-out candle, every Mazel Tov, every turn of the tassel, we are handed what a writer dreads most: blank pages. It’s never a notebook we need. If we have a story to tell, an idea carbonating past the brim of us, we will write it on our arms, thighs, any bare meadow of skin. In the absence of pens, we repeat our lines deliriously like the telephone number of a parting stranger until we become the craziest one on the subway. If you really love a writer, fuck her on a coffee table. Find a gravestone of someone who shares her name and take her to it. When her door is plastered with an eviction notice, do not offer your home. Say I Love You, then call her the wrong name. If you really love a writer, bury her in all your awful and watch as she scrawls her way out.
DURING THE WEEK I THOUGHT I WAS CARRYING YOUR CHILD
I gutted the library, hunting
for what happens when a coyote fucks
a Labrador, if their pup can be trained
to lick the mailman.
Counted all the stairs from my kitchen
to the cellar, sifted through the phonebook
for a friend who loved me enough
to push me down them.
Discovered my mother humming to the garden:
voice fat with water, chrysanthemums
swelling faster from the sound.
During the week I thought
I was carrying your child,
I did not sing.
THE WORST THING I EVER TAUGHT MY GIRL
from my mother’s perspective, after Jeanann Verlee
When my daughter came home from school, sorrow shrill
as a recess bell, her story hop-scotching through hiccups
to tell me that Bobby keeps yanking her pigtails
like two ends of a jump rope, calling her
Stupid so often she swears he thinks it’s her name—
I cupped her cheeks, shivering like the heart of a snowman,
and said My baby, my beautiful girl, don’t you know? He’s trying
to get your attention. It probably means he likes you.
PENELOPE PUSSYCAT FINALLY SPEAKS
on her career with Warner Bros. and on-set romance
with Pepé Le Pew
It took fifty years to give me a name.
Half a century of being only his
mon cheri, mademoiselle.
Penelope Pussycat
they finally stamped me,
a moniker borrowed from a girl corkscrewed
around a pole, dollar bills for panties.
Fitting, they said.
I slinked under a freshly painted ladder
and a white stripe burned into my fur like a scarlet A,
meant I was asking for it. That I wanted to always be watched
through binoculars, fancied the trail of drooling kisses
from my paw to collar laid on thick
as his French accent,
that my mad dash from his grasp
meant I liked to be chased, meant yes!—and of course,
they never gave me a voice, just a little French
before small words: le mew, le purr,
when bolting from him: le puff, le pant,
le gasp!
When Pepé sauntered past, people plugged their noses
with clothespins, buildings wilted around him, paint slid o" statues
and kids at home laughed and laughed and spit
out their cereal.
It wasn’t because of his stench that I inched o"
those cliffs—but how he pretended my refusal was foreplay.
No matter how many times I ran from him, dove
to my cartoon deaths, he was always there
to catch me; The Poster Boy of Romance,
waiting, claws outstretched.
FAMILY
Tell us who did this to you. His
name is not safe in your mouth. Tell
us the shape of his shadow. Your
story. What shade of dusk he wears,
the floorboards he haunts—which
borough? We’d like to meet
the one who turned your body into dangling meat.
Who turned your smile into his
masquerade, who wishboned
your legs but did not wish? Tell
us who made you