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    After the Witch Hunt
    After the Witch Hunt
    After the Witch Hunt
    Ebook103 pages47 minutes

    After the Witch Hunt

    By Megan Falley

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    As if she discovered a small army of silenced women captive in her pen, Megan Falley releases them in the spilled ink that is her most brilliant collection of poems, After the Witch Hunt. Demanding "if you really love a writer, bury her in all your awful and watch as she scrawls her way out," her book does exactly that. An incessant digging, a journey in building escape routes, armed with both humor and a brazen darkness, each poem in this book of bloodletting is another swing of the pick and axe in this young woman's labor, insistent upon light.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateApr 22, 2014
    ISBN9781935904649
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      Book preview

      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

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