LANNIE STABILE
CW – sexual assault
Slasher Flicks Are Often Parables on Life-Long Healing
I’m sitting on the couch
watching a horror movie
and eating Pad Thai
with crushed peanuts,
even though I am allergic.
So what if my throat shrinks
when the one thing
I really need to talk about
is a decade old
and growing.
Words tumble in my mouth,
clunky and expired
like bodies in an industrial dryer.
A memory looping, looping.
I think about Brandy
in I Still Know
What You Did Last Summer,
how her scream fell out
with the dead laundress,
but snagged
at Mekhi’s spontaneous
tracheotomy.
Like Miss Norwood,
I’ve developed calluses
on my fingers from counting
how many times I’ve relived
a drunken summer party.
How many times I had too many
wine coolers washed down
with agave-flavored peer pressure.
My throat closes up
when I remember how
I walked into that room voluntarily,
his tongue the only hook in my lip.
Our clothes the only dirty
linen tumbling.
Dreadlocked Jack Black
was stoned when he died,
garden shears
piercing his Hawaiian shirt.
I too have been impaled
while intoxicated.
And I can tell you
senses are not dulled,
but alive and kicking
the sheets off the bed.
Sometimes your friend
is the man in the slicker,
holding an ice hook
to your trembling body
daring you to move
on from the summer.
As I spoon rice noodles
into my mouth
I taste the sweet nuttiness
and watch the credits roll.
Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, “Strange Furniture,” is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.