Everything Nice

by lauren anne cassidy

Would that I could to the wind, say nothing but

instead, smoke omegas are born into becoming

and the Secret Garden is haunted by vowels, voles,

and forgetting. It is all stirring still behind those walls

You hold the key, the ash cross on your forehead creased

She has a mauve floral dress, wallpaper from the 60s you

find depressing, a candelabra in the window of her mind,

blinking twice for yes. And Catherine Morland’s suitor scorned

its use - as if women don’t spurn it further. Long, the road for

those who have thrust upon them Great Pedantry

Nay, says the vicar, with its great lack, comes responsibility

As if, nothing but a flap of skin and fingernails full of it, digging

The grind of grin and bear it like a pepper shaker. The peeling

off of it until you have the right fit. A mackintosh on a pin prick.

A petticoat on a broom. Fake tan smeared on a mirror. Blood on

the bathroom floor. Like a dirty protest in The Lady’s Dressing

Room

I hold multitudes, with a kaleidoscopic gut contracting

I write words, and with tweezers, taking them from the wallpaper

of my mind watch them wriggle like maggots and place them in

the prison bars of a notepad so unlike scattered petals, bullets,

shrapnel and ash, a dandelion sneeze, these Scrabble pieces I,

as time tells, take back – a reverse lump in my throat, plasticine

returned to the matrix of ash, and dust, and shit, and cum

of a nice shapeless form