The Centipede.

by Clarissa Fortin

We meet in the kitchen at 2am.

I’m in my toothpaste-stained dressing gown.

You’re sporting 15 pairs of hair-slim legs.

I stare down your faceted eyes wondering what I look like from all those receptors. Like the hideous spawn of a worm and a porcupine?

Because that’s what you look like. You look like the writhing child of Satan: a yellow-grey nightmare on dainty little feet.

I knew from the moment I saw you that it was my sanity or your
life.

Maybe if you hadn’t brushed against my hand when you galloped up out of the drain, maybe if it wasn’t 2am maybe if I could find it in my soul to rationalize that you are a harmless creature, a spider, wasp, cockroach and bed bug devourer, a uniquely fascinating nocturnal hunter that grooms and mates and survives alongside me as a co-habitor on this earth, maybe if the way you exist wasn’t so deeply offensively disturbing to me personally maybe things would end differently.

“Who sent you?” I ask.

It’s 2am and I think I’m Robert Frost talking to a white spider on a white heal-all, I think I’m being decisive against “darkness to appall” sent from a cruel God when I pursue your speeding body across the counter and triumphantly slam the Tupperware container down trapping you underneath.

I weight it down with books knowing how your respiratory system works, how it cannot abide dehydration.

And that is it.

I leave you there. Scuttle back to my room.

Lay in the dark air and think of you circling disgustingly until you suffocate.

I twist in my sheets and I twist in my mind troubled to find it a sometimes-hostile place: hard as an uncaring God and ugly as a harmless centipede.

 

Clarissa Fortin is a lover of poetry, a hater of centipedes, a hair-dye enthusiast, and a future dead person.

Vibrator Sestina

by Clarissa Fortin

I tell my sister I want a vibrator
“Me too,” she whispers. We cackle. The line
crackles with the spark of our ambition.
As quiet Catholic girls we once hoped
To be chaste and pure ‘till blessed marriage
Now we plot together for a grand sin.

No one ever told us “pleasure is sin.”
No one ever said, “sin looks like a vibrator.”
We learned instinctively from a marriage
Of weird shame and weirder saints.

A long line of blue robed girls,
Mary’s daughters hoped
To reach that mythical ambition.
Now we hope for a vibrator.
Because we heard Saint Teresa’s line
We know something “made her moan,” without marriage.

My mind wasn’t meant to wait for marriage.
But I never could act on my ambition
A bored girl at church singing a nice hymn line
About Solomon, unaware of her sinful
imagination run rampant – a vibrator
in her mind: not quite what the saints had hoped.

“How will we get it?” a repeating line
“Where will we get it?” We both really hope
to be cool. To say as we wear our sleeves on our sin:
“One vibrator please!”, as sure as marriage
and brave in our battery powered ambition

 

Clarissa Fortin is a lover of poetry, a hater of centipedes, a hair-dye
enthusiast, and a future dead person.