A GIRL MUST BE BRAVER THAN WE EVER ASK OURSELVES TO BE

by Michael Brockley

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

I wasn’t surprised, just scared. Chaos hides wild cards in its holster. An heirloom is twice as valuable when broken. My hair covers my eyes as I lean into the reporter’s mic. Those saxophone solos I listened to, those mad songs with titles I no longer remember. C’est la vie. I always expected it would happen here. I can no longer tell where you begin and I drop out. I fled past the echo of gunshots. Past the corpse of my first boy friend. Before a detective outlined his body with chalk. I used to write poems with line breaks but now I write broken poems. The time we wasted on love songs. Thoughts and prayers. Chaos slipped a joker into my purse as I smiled the way one does when monsters hold five aces. When I found the jester entangled in my last kleenex, I read on the card the vow Chaos always honors: “Let me introduce you to your bogeyman.”

Michael Brockley is a semi-retired school psychologist who works in rural northeast Indiana. His poems have appeared in Flying Island, Third Wednesday, Gargoyle, Atticus Review and