Spend most of the family party daydreaming: visiting dive bars down the river, throwing
back bourbon, taking home a rough man. Want to be punished. Always want to be taken
apart. What if you run into that dark forest? Merge with the air or sit a corpse in no man’s land.
Foul-play-theories won’t rationalize a healthy woman walking into the woods to die alone
like a sick cat, can’t imagine the cats you’ve known, that you learned to die from the best.
***
Blake L. Bell is finishing up her MFA at Mississippi University for Women and teaches at a magnet high school in South Louisiana. To read more of her poems and stories, visit blakelbell.com or follow her @blakelbell.
***
image: Lindsay Hargrave
Rejection Letters 