Monologue to a Security Camera at the End of the World

 

by Kristin Abraham

 

 

 

 

I will read to you.  I will read to calm the horses in your limbs,

and the fox, the frantic, panting dogs in your eyes,

the polar bear tumbling through your belly, the tortoise.

I will read to keep the wolf from the door.

 

But I will read so you cry, you cross animal, so you sorrow yourself

in the text of the grass, so you will never lift your wretched head again.

 

I will read to you an unplanned sunrise and situational depression,

and the birds will sing because they don’t know any better.

 

I will read that blue moons aren’t really blue but ripe to bursting

and only this once.  I will read that and you must take comfort in it.

 

I will read in just this voice, hissing it into your breath

as you pass for sleep, furious with the dead in your life.

I will read we buy balloons, we let them go, and you will take familiar

comfort, and then take terror now before never.  I will read the fable

of the shopping and the emptiness.  The fable of the fairground

and the flea, the fable of your mother and the self, of the courtesy

and the free pass, of your mother and the blinders.  And the moral

of the story is you.  The moral of the story

is stop.  The moral of the story doesn’t even know itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kristin Abraham is the author of two chapbooks: Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus (Subito Press, 2008) and Orange Reminds You of Listening (Elixir Press, 2006).  Her full-length manuscript, The Disappearing Cowboy Trick, will be published by Horse Less Press in 2013.  Additional poetry, lyric essays, and critical essays have appeared in such places as Best New Poets 2005, American Letters & Commentary, Rattle, Court Green, LIT, Columbia Poetry Review and The Journal.  She currently teaches English at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, WY, and is editor-in-chief and poetry editor of the literary journal, Spittoon.