The Woods

The Woods


The girl with the bloody shirt stretched
almost to breaking over her chest was crying
in the corner provocatively
when I got to the hospital.
"We didn't know," she said,

spitting the words out like confetti while
I tried to remember why I'd ever taken
this job, and how I could've thought it
would matter.
It had been a hard week, and the commander

was coming down on me like a piano.
I was 6 days from retirement, and I was
getting real nervous.
"It was spring break," she sobbed,
which is difficult to do

while speaking, so I immediately respected
her resolve. "We went for a class trip;
just the senior modeling school class.
And we were all wearing high heels
and wet tee-shirts.

We found some old Indian burial ground,
and Harold was telling Maude about this guy
who'd escaped from an insane asylum
and killed a bunch of girls
cause their implants

jiggled so loud he couldn't sleep.
Then Harold and Maude went off to have sex
in the woods, and they never came back.
We were too busy taking showers together
to notice.

Then in the morning we found Harold's
foot stuffed in Maude's mouth—"
"That's not funny," I interrupted.
Then for good measure, I slapped her
hard, on the behind, which was covered
with blood. It got on my hand

but I didn't notice until later when
I was halfway through a bag of Cheetos,
and realized that my fingers were pink,
instead of the customary orange.

Blood has a way of doing that.
That's another thing

I won't miss. It was the usual story:
overbearing mother reproduces psychopathic
killer with definite latent heterosexual
tendencies, psychopathic killer spies
unsuspecting troop of overenthusiastic

scantily clad models, psychopathic killer
enacts a twisted sort of population control
on said models by killing all of the ones
who slow down enough to have sex.
One model lucks into some incredibly simple
yet ridiculous method of dispatching

said psychopathic killer,
killer is dispatched; model survives,
and dollars to donuts, when I try to dig
that psychopathic killer's
moldy corpse up from the bottom
of whatever river

she left it in, he'll be gone.
Just as I was stepping out of the donut shop
with a fresh bag of crullers
a van swerved around an angry insert
minority group man who was running

towards me with a sword, and ran over
my toe, while various prostitutes
struck kung fu poses all over
the sidewalk. 6 more days
and I'll move somewhere peaceful,
like Detroit or Cincinnati.


CL Bledsoe

Posted over on A Little Poetry