Come closer, divorcees, theys, and gays
Unhappy middle aged wives
Salad servers and romaine lettuce eaters
Hear ye, Hear ye,
sons of Medusa
And daughters of Eve
Come closer, my dears, to the cauldron
From which we summon our strength
Into the pot we throw our pain
And in a few days, hours even,
We have formed a soup of surrender.
The real magic here? The murmurs
You too? You don’t say…
And: me too, you’re not alone
And I believe you
You didn’t deserve that
That’s a lot for you to carry
Here, throw it in the pot
Throw in the empty beer bottle,
The sobriety coin
The bloodstained apron
The key to the storage unit you can’t bear to unlock
Throw in the towel you used to clean yourself as best you could when he left the bedroom
Throw in the diet pills
The shape wear rolled up into a corner
The teeth whitening kit that made your mouth glow with pain
Throw it all in
And inch a bit closer to the circle
We may have brought different pain to the cauldron
But we’re all here to watch it boil.
Amelia Colwell is a writer working on her debut memoir, a hybrid of prose, poetry, and fairy tales, weaved together to make sense of trauma. Her poetry has been published in The Iowa Review, and she wrote and performed an episode of Out Cold: A Spooky Anthology Series, a horror podcast that debuted as a top fiction podcast on Apple and was nominated for a Minnesota WebFest award. Amelia was a cast member in the Listen to Your Mother –Twin Cities storytelling show. She works as a fundraising consultant.
