Tonight's Poet Corner: Enter, If You Dare

Enter, If You Dare
by Belinda Roddie

A series of irrational actions
I could take when my eyes are
superglued into a staring contest
with the void: 

1. Shave my head,
so my face can perfectly maintain
the shape, color, and texture
of a spoiled hard boiled egg.

2. Drink pickle juice
straight from the jar - which
I actually don't mind doing
from time to time, but
but in this situation, it would be
for the sole purpose of drying out
my blood cells and turning me into
a second Dead Sea.

3. Paint my nails,
but in the weirdest, most clashing
hues - hot pinks and swamp greens
and sad shithouse red, so no one
pays attention to the stained words
sticking to my teeth and only to
the monstrosities bursting out
of my fingers like Lovecraft's
racist textual nightmares.

4. Adopt an otter.
I will never adopt an otter.
They are cute, but my cat
would hate me forever.

5. Move to Montana
and become a cowboy,
including drinking myself
to death with the help of
the besotted bastards themselves,
Jack Daniels and Jim Beam.
I don't even like their whiskey that much.

6. Experiment with marrying a man.
Get the wedding done in Vegas
before immediately getting
the last standing Elvis impersonator
to help you with the annulment.

7. Marry the Elvis impersonator.
Then annul that marriage, too.

8. Spend all the money my wife and I
saved for the down payment on our house
on a farm that I will never live on,
but I will tend to a rabbit hutch
in honor of Lennie fucking Smalls.

9. Actually read more books.

10. Write more stupid list poems
because there are clearly not enough
out there, already spraying microphones
with a disinfectant meant to cleanse
the audience's soul, only I need
an exorcism.

It is so easy to laugh about how close
I get to the edge, because if I'm dancing
while still teetering, you can pretend
that there's music playing. I like

to compare my brain to a haunted house,
my neuroses to the ghosts who have set up
shop in its basement, who make face masks for
COVID-19 and never sell them, and who
occasionally shriek loudly enough to wake
the neighbor's dog. The trouble is,

people like to talk about haunted houses
and going into them, but the moment
the monsters actually awake inside, the fleeing
is real. And I know they will never
knock on my door again. Because I

am not the walls or the furniture,
not the bricks or the shingles,
not the beautiful fireplace with the mantel
gleaming varnished gold. Not the phonograph
in the corner, playing a tune I loved from
my childhood, but I can't remember the name.
Not the endless rows

of pictures of me smiling, loving,
and loved. My demons have left too
big of scratches on their glossy finishes.
I am reduced to symptoms and nightly pills,
and crying fits aimed toward the smoky sky.
I am a beast who can only be so proud of
their own monstrosity before the fangs are bared.

They say that when you gaze into
the void, sometimes it stares back.
But it doesn't have eyes. Instead, I see
ten shadows lingering on a staircase
with only nine steps. They wear the same
red coats, with eight brass buttons on
each side. The Seventh Shadow smiles,

but they have no teeth. Just six tongues
to stifle its own speech. With five fingers,
they reach out to me. It takes four minutes
for me to break free. Three seconds for me
to scream. Two more before the panic
attack sets in. One rational action: Sleep.