I have to kill you, though I haven’t decided how.
Cancer, perhaps, sugaring your face in polyps,
the violins swelling behind your rickety hospital bed.
Or a gunshot to the chest, shattering your ribs
and the heart behind like a finch in a cage.
But you’re what my professor calls the protagonist,
which means you’re impervious to bullets and love,
free to die only in one of those wrong-place, wrong-time deals.
Maybe you’re a cutter—though the audience couldn’t know—
breaking the mirror in your too-clean bathroom,
shredding like cheese the skin at the bend of your elbow
where no one can see. I’d hate to jab an ice pick into your skull,
or a harpoon’s barb in your thigh right after you saved
so valiantly the aquatic animal named Jimmy.
But my professor harps my draft thirsts for conflict.
that it demands your baby’s mama, or Japanese ex-cons,
abortions and the stones thrown at the clinics.
Everyone loves a dead hero, though I have never loved you
that way. You could have delivered your saccharine thank yous
at the podium, stroking your trophy’s head like a little Buddha,
never noticing the curtain’s faint ripple, my hand disrobing
its knife or machete—something sharp and Hollywoody—
never noticing, as you lay there gasping, the Yes! cries
of my professor, capturing the roundness of her chest in flat palms,
or all the eyes of the cameras trained on me, and how I skirt around
your body, springing that note card from my waist pocket, flying off
the names of all the little people, your name, of course, first.
Brittany Presley lives in San Diego, California.
