Choosing a jury
The first question they asked for my trial was:
Have you been in love before?
They disqualified participants on no particular grounds,
shoving and shunning at least half of the town.
I was left with two women from the local madhouse;
their Sunday best resplendent in its unsuitability;
their caked-on makeup disguised unkissed lips,
untouched cheeks, unseen eyes yawning open in
an eternal ache to be wanted.
That was the first time any member of the jury
watched the defendant with some measure of envy.
I remember the way the one wrapped in velvet gazed at me,
her disposition black as a funeral, real anger in her expression
amidst an otherwise unremarkable array of decomposing faces.
Opening statements
The prosecution rises, the lawyer’s chin overgrown
with the mossy beginning of facial hair. I wasn’t sure
where my guilt was but I knew it had to do with the
beating heart rotting in my chest. The courtroom could
be a church for how badly I wanted to be saved.
He makes his argument, lays out the harm I’ve
envisioned enough to make real. The judge asked
me why I was laughing and all I could do was give
in to the hot fat tears rolling down my face;
trying to run from what I knew I wanted but
never needed enough to deserve.
Witness testimony
She didn’t do it, he insisted, his flesh flush against the stand.
You’re not here to argue for her innocence, said the prosecution,
you’re here to account for how many times she traced the best
place for the knife to enter through your back.
The truth, echoed the chorus, or maybe the jury did that,
but sometimes it’s hard to decipher what’s the story and what’s your life.
He glanced at me, light like life in his veins, and I knew
he wanted me enough for the suffering to be seen,
for my tombstone to still read she was known.
The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth,
I muttered, sort of addled, my touch trembling on a copy of
Wuthering Heights because I figured if I had to swear I
might as well do it on something holy.
Cross examination
Did the defendant bruise her heels on blood red shoes
like the stepmother in Snow White desperate
to assert her beauty one last time?
Did the defendant spend more than one sleepless night
wishing for the salvation of one hundred years
to rescue her from unspoken fears?
Did the defendant leave her shoe in your life just so
she could agonize over whether you’d want
her to take it back?
Did the defendant turn herself in?
Closing arguments
They let me speak at the last moment, one fading
voice destined for the graveyard as the room pulsed alive.
I clutched a chess piece tight in my palm, the wood
cutting into the days when I still felt like I might crawl
out of the coffin and learn to live.
I met him and the world ended, I said, plagues and lead
in the water and bodies filling the streets to scream
in pain and rage and hope. I thought we would end too.
Only your world ended, scoffed the judge, his liver-spotted
hands heavy around the gavel.
Jury instruction
This trial is a formality. The defendant is guilty.
Guilty until proven innocent until proven guilty until
found under the covers at five in the morning, awake
and shaking under sunlight, hands trembling against
her own barren ribcage. The mad women, lobotomized
and drooling, sign their assent as easily as the people who
claimed to love them did theirs. The others follow suit.
Verdict
Either you eat the story or the story eats you.
So I joined my loveless compatriots at the madhouse
on the road behind the cemetery, the old moving to
make way for the new. He visited me once, his wrists
bearing another woman’s perfume, and all I could do
was bare my teeth behind a mouth painted with sorrow.
Either you become the story or the story becomes you,
and I was the woman in the attic, the boy crying wolf,
the dead body still trying to find its own pulse.