Episode 007: Flip the Precarious Culmination

Guilliean reads her self-penned poetry. Stream the episode below and read along with the author.

1. Flip the Script

It had to look real. 
bruise had to be shaped just so. 
Lampshade swayed like Newton's law, equal but opposite. 
It was the only heavy object within reach. 
Timed carefully. 
The neighbors weren't here. 
They would see his car in the driveway. 
The wound would be temporary. 
Band-Aid. 
This house, a prison, 
an expensive gilded cage.

2. Culmination

I'm trying to recall 
how it felt to have 
a country home in your arms
 the scent of your cologne 
blinds the fiber of my being 
a party, as the world ends
 the beat of your heart 
unsweetened lemonade 
on the tongue of my skin
 I used to excite your molecules
 false oxygen in your brain 
fired by the micro waves of touch
 is there a space for me
 at your table for two 
I make coffee for you
 in the a.m. 
like you were real 
like you're not in my bones 
wear not my crown 
the one I bought you 
to hide your gray hairs 
that I didn't mind 
as much as you
Eighteen months later, a love heart 
like water into the gutter, 
echoes on the empty McMansions. 
Singing profanity, vain words 
of the love and devotion 
I used to feel about us, 
about you, you selfish cunt. 
When all I wanted was you, 
that's all I ever wanted.

3. The Precarious Position

Walk a perfect circle around me. 
Quietly observe my happily married peers
Some with kids, some not, but never alone. 
I don't see the start of that world for me, ever, 
and I feel strangely fine. 
Liberation opened doors for my gender, 
to choose or not to choose, 
but sometimes? 
perhaps only when I breathe 
my Catholic guilt suggests 
I should crash into a twist of fate. 
I wasn't supposed to end up like Madame Bovary, 
her concepts of life guided by books, 
the trajectory of her existence 
based on the romance, 
never living life, 
merely thrust into it 
like the sound of a kick drum. 
I was supposed to have seen the world by now, 
a blitzkrieg of light in the form of knowledge, 
London, Paris, Tokyo, Madrid
trapped in a snow globe of dust and cactus
measured as a lengthy, self-inflicted bender, 
weeping in some dark abscess of neon. 
What does heaven look like to an angel? 
Is it the same as ours? 
Is it guided by instinctively knowing? 
And what is heaven to an angel anyways? 
Do they need to drive towards that perfection 
like the rest of us do, 
or do they travel with it, 
in books, 
as the rest of us do?

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