So, what you’re suggesting is that there was a system of replacement, power for power, when all hell broke loose and you said you loved me on my radio. Then, I walked through stained glass without a cut where the earth and sky appear to meet. I should realize I’m good enough on my own. But I knew that before and am also greedy, which you suggested. So, the words on the radio could just be self-reflective: I love you enough to want the money and power it takes to keep you. Are you an object? Are you more than the mirror media provides me with?

 

I feel like I’m being tokenized, you’d said, and I probably looked like that was implausible. There are scars, for example, like the half-inch line between my eyebrows that was treated by a sorority sister’s dad after I tripped into a doorjamb. Or the skin cancer I had removed from my nose and the inside corner of my left eye because I tanned one time too many.

 

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Beth McDermott is a writer in the Southwest suburbs of Chicago. Her chapbook, How to Leave a Farmhouse, was published by Porkbelly Press. Recent poetry, reviews, and criticism appear in Kenyon Review Online, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Trumpeter. Essays and reviews about art and ecology can be found in After the Art, American Book Review, the Spoon River Poetry review blog and Kudzu House Quarterly.