What If Reclaimed the Woman

who framed her own murder

to get her husband’s life insurance,

chopped up her father and stepmother

to protect her lesbian lover,

strangled the girls her mother loved more

and pulled out all their teeth,

put arsenic in the family dinner

and watched all their heads drop,

seduced and murdered her professor

then framed him for suicide,

rescued her favorite author

then chopped off his legs

because he killed her favorite character,

the woman who

held up the gun she bought for protection,

under her own name,

the woman who pointed at

a long, arched back,

coated with black, shiny

hair and said, “Wait,

don’t go.”

Yolanda asks

what is happening?

Melissa is like

“What do you

mean?”

Yolanda’s like,

“It’s like I can see you,

but I can’t see you.”

Melissa looks down at her hands

and they are not there.

Somewhere from the mirror

there is snickering.