Monologue Madness

Dear Virgina, I left you a note At the bottom of the sea Written in waterproof ink That tells a story About a girl Who met a man And washed away Please understand that I, myself Am not depressed Or sad Or in any way feeling the way You must have felt When you decided That life was too much In no way am I minimizing Your pain Or your struggle But I feel a kinship with you That I can’t explain The other day I was younger Much younger A version of myself I don’t remember And I found myself sitting in the middle of a lake Dry as a bone Wondering why the water Wouldn’t touch me I’m older now But I’m not old Or at least That’s what I tell myself And water still won’t Give me a second look I met him somewhere between The younger version And the me I am now And I thought I would know him forever And never really know him at all He was that sort of a person We met on the land But after ten seconds ...

Dear Helen, We hear you’re living in Scoville now Past the lake where the soldiers wash their clothes Next to the market where the minotaur works In a little house With little windows That you can barely see out of And dark curtains that hang over them Like the mirrors of a mourner In the heart of his grief Do you know what we hear now At the church to Athena? Or at the picnics While the goats are roasting And the virgins dance? We hear— ‘How is your niece Helen doing?’ And we have to smile And tell them about your wedding The one we won’t be attending Because it takes place At the altar of an enemy A kidnapper A man with no god And no principles Who takes, takes, takes Which is not unlike a man But which is nothing To be celebrated We walk around the park In our sneakers And sweaters Because the weather Has a chill now That even the memory of summer Can’t scare away And in the middle of the park ...

Dear Frank, When I was thirteen I promised you my heart All these years later And here we are Me still holding my heart You—dead And I have something to tell you And you’re not going to like it But I’m going to tell you anyway So you’re just going to have to learn To live with it Which shouldn’t be too hard Since you’ve been gone for so long Here goes nothing— I’m getting married, Frank He’s a real nice guy From the neighborhood I’ve known him since I was eight years old His name is Carmine Romano I’m going to be Mrs. Carmine Romano And I gotta tell you I’m pretty excited about it When you go through your whole life With the last name Uberschwayne Romano is a breath of fresh air Carmine first proposed to me When we were ten years old He waited two whole years The chicken Then he asked me again when I was seventeen Right after we both finished school I said— ‘I can’t marry you, Carmine.  I’m...

Dear Cinderella, We bought a pumpkin after you left But it did not swell or expand No matter how much we prayed over it And begged it to bloom Another disappointment In what has become A life of grounded expectations Mother is cruel to us now And tells us we are not her daughters She says you were her only real daughter This is coming from the hurt in her heart A hurt that exists because you have not invited her— or us To your royal wedding Also, birds continue to fly ‘round the house Leaving us to wonder if you’ve bewitched us In some way Using powers we never knew you had Such as turning mice into coachmen And tattered rags into evening gowns What a strange girl you are And what a strange story you have If only to have a story like that for ourselves Rather than just be part of one Characters who live on wallpaper And peel off when they're not needed Mother says no one will remember us when we die But that they wi...

What a way to live Inside a dirty house We prepare the meals at seven George cuts I bake We fry Together Silverware laid out But never used We eat With our hands He asks me How the poetry goes I tell him it goes everywhere But on the paper He sips wine I gulp George is a retired dancer With a clavicle injury I’m a poet Who teaches tenth graders The potential Of a sentence Evenings at six are dinner Seven is for television Eight is for reading And nine is bed These days It used to be That we’d go out on Tuesdays But then our favorite restaurant closed Due to a rat infestation And now we order in And pretend we’re out I put on make-up And George wears a tie We do these funny little things To amuse ourselves Someone might ask me ‘Do you love George?’ And I would reply— ‘He amuses me’ A marriage has several directions It can take Amusement Is one of the smoother roads ...

Your grandfather and I Loved each other Until the day He made me a citizen I was sitting in a little house The one he bought for me After the coup Polishing the jewelry I smuggled out of the country When he asked me If I would go to the store And pick up some margarine The question so puzzled me That I repeated it back to myself And this caused him to repeat it again For what reason, I don’t know And we kept on this way for almost a minute Before I said to him— ‘We have  people  for that’ And he said— ‘Not anymore, we don’t’ And that was when I knew Our marriage was over Sometimes love goes away Because you change And sometimes love goes away Because the things around you change I was always a Queen But your grandfather stopped being a King And that was something I couldn’t abide Royalty in exile is still royalty --Or so I thought Your grandfather disagreed He thought we should adjust ...

You know, I was very excited An American movie An American movie with Americans I was very excited And I practiced, you know My, uh, the way The way of speaking Like an American But one thing I could never quite get Was the crying? The American crying? It always, uh, it escaped me I couldn’t quite master Crying in English In American, I should say Leading up to it I would be fine The emotion The confusion All the things, you know The things that happen As a person begins To cry But— I would get to the, uh You know, the actual crying And it just wouldn’t work And my director My American director A very nice woman Named Sheila Would look at me With kindness in her eyes This woman Who is over-budget And starving And breast-feeding a child Who is much too old To be breast-fed And she approaches me And this is the, you know Third or fourth time This has happened Where she has had to, u...

We killed all the cows today And you weren’t here Your mother did most of the work I just looked on And tried to nap I sit in chairs now You remember me sitting? I bet you don’t Never sat so much in my life But I’m tired I’m tired and I’m mad And my wife kills the cows Because I’m too damn weak To do it myself And where are you? That’s what I’d like to know Where the hell are you? The chair is a rocking chair And so it goes And so I go with it Your mother’s hands Are colored brown and rusty And she won’t look at me anymore Because her life went From easy to hard And that’s a hard way to go For anybody She lays in your bed at night And asks the ceiling Where you are Maybe one day We’ll all go crazy And the ceiling will answer her Who knows? My new favorite question— Who knows? Who knows if you’re coming back? Who knows if you hate us? Who knows if you’re even alive? My father s...