I’ve finished the rough draft of the mannequin story and I’m letting it sit for a few days before I returned to tinker with it. I’m back to feeling normal after a week of being under the weather, so that’s good. In the meantime, I was looking for poems to submit and came across this one.

Web

I get tangled so easily
in her strings and I never
think to extricate myself,
even when she rolls her
eyes and chides me for
using a word like “extricate”
when, she says, untangle
would work just as well.

“That’s the thing, though,”
I try to say, my words muffled.
“I said ‘tangled’ in the first
line and it wouldn’t do to say
‘untangled’ just a few lines later.”

She sits farther back on the web,
her legs tingling with every vibration.
“So this is about poetry,” she sighs.
“Haven’t you learned anything from me?”

Not enough, apparently, I think to
myself, brimming with gallows humor.
I can no longer speak, but that’s okay.
My eyes dilate like I’m drugged, and
perhaps I am…tomorrow, she’ll free
me, and we’ll start from the beginning.