The Ocotillo Review V 3.2
In these times it can be challenging to support the status quo. In so many ways the seams of our social fabric are being stressed to the point of disintegration. When I heard these two poems by women express these viewpoints so drastically different but so emphatically powerful I knew their words needed to have a platform. Am I right?
Self Portrait as Marilyn Monroe
by Rebecca Danley
It’s called a sheath dress. It sparkles like notoriety.
Exactly what I’m shooting for,
an image no one will forget.
I’ve been cast as brazen, as simpering, as silly,
a sex-goddess. Aphrodite’s got nothing
on me. Others may win Oscars,
I’ll never be forgotten. Here’s the thing:
I’ll sing it the way they expect, those men
in their grey suits, their wives in Chanel,
Happy Birthday all breath and suggestion, slightly off key,
full of lovers’ sighs. One day they’ll play at being me, a star, a president’s lover, a suicide.
This is my swansong. This is something like power,
like an assassin’s sword pulled from its sheath.
When I sing, I’ll be sanguine.
After serving eight years in the United States Air Force, Rebecca Danelly (Houston,TX) graduated in 1999 from the University of Houston with a BA in English/Creative Writing. Since then she has taught, raised children, trained dogs, and worked on her craft. She has work in Glass Mountain, The Ocotillo Review and West Texas Literary Review.
Post Wedding
by Kate Rex
Dear groom I present you with this void,
the one you will call yours,
the one that will be known as yours by the name she has taken.
It has the shape of someone you used to know.
You can drag it around with you
and if you paint it with mirror paint you can stand it next to you when you meet people
and she will be visible, well maybe not her, but it will be seen.
In the beginning she will insist she was a daughter, a sister with the other name.
She may tell you how her previous name used to be intermingled with terms of affection,
and how she can still smell her mother when she hears it.
She will privately remember the sound of her first love whispering that other name.
She will go on and on about how she used to have to wait almost till the end of the register at school for her name to be called on the 2280 days she attended school
and will remember stepping outside of herself while she waited watching herself be her.
Remind her she has a new name and give some of your stories so it doesn’t feel so empty.
The rest will fade.
These are the organizations that will have to know she is no longer who she was:
- The passport office
- The inland revenue
- The electoral roll
- The council
- The DVLA
- Utilities, communications, finance, insurances
- Memberships
- Doctor and dentist
- Professionals
- Her on-line stuff
- Her work
A shame really she was quite something with some of them.
They won’t care. She might feel the loss
It is true all these and other threads of her life interlaced making her who she was, and they all carried the other name,
all the more reason to unravel them a bit.
It is a part of making her wholly yours.
You will need to do something about her friends.
They must realign or go.
Try to make them your besties
Put them off track.
Introduce her to them as your wife, with your stories, your influences, your taste.
Make it big and loud.
Allow no opportunities for sober private conversations.
When the paint starts to wear she will be sufficiently reconstructed.
And will have that new signature to perfection.
Kate Rex has always lived on the edges looking in. She is a one woman Greek chorus with a lot to say. She writes and paints and stamps around the hills in the south of France where she spends most of her time. She has read and performed in a number European and US poetry festivals.
