Monster
At the end of the horror movie, when our person has killed
the monster-villain, she–and I’m thinking of heroines here,
Sigourney or Jamie Lee–looks to the camera and we feel delight for her,
we know she deserves this relief from all the hard work of killing and life.
We relax a little, we undo some fears and let ourselves imagine
what it’s like afterward, when the work is all done and we can put
our feet up on the couch and turn on some comfort TV, martini in hand.
But down in our guts we know it’s not done, the monster
is about to appear behind her and she’ll have to find somewhere
the strength to do it all again, as she does every single day.
At the End of the Movie
(on watching Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days)
At the end of the movie
we all stayed in our seats
no murmur or stretch
no shrug-on of coats, no
movement toward the next thing.
The final frames had us
spell-bound, all of us
in the theater still feeling
pain and joy, still
feeling human
together in the dark.
This might be the only
thing we do better
than animals–unless
fox mothers tell their kits
stories in the den,
or bears make shadow-play
on cave walls.
But they don't.
No, this one thing is good
about us, truly good,
that we’re sometimes able
to imagine each other.
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (Kelsay Books 2024), and two chapbooks: Tell the Bees (A3 Press 2019), and Full Mouth (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
January House Literary Journal 
Leave a comment