Monologue of Despair

Don’t you know I was raised to be forgiving?

The trick is to look at your grief sideways,

in between the eyebrows, never the pupils

whose truth could turn you to salt and stone.

You have to look at your gripe through a window,

but the glass should be dirty, foggy. Huff hot air

so it blurs, the outside blobs hard to make out

and easy enough to dismiss when asked

whether you remember what happened

that night. It works sometimes. You think

I don’t know? Nothing really stops the pain

from crystallizing, not even the steam of anger.

You think I don’t know that the wrong is there,

still, an eclipse that blinds, a Greek myth

that doesn’t let me look back? It’ll kill me. I know.

I’ll keep staring off into the distance until it does.

This poem appeared in Variant Literature, Issue 18, Spring 2024.

10.09.2026

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