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Molly Crighton

I Cope With Things Very Well
(Which is a Lie)


because I am a hysterical Victorian woman
clawing at my own face in a fainting chaise longue
and smacking my plate of oxtail toast off the table.

I am a rabid hyena that bites my own tail and tears
leaving a gore-crater in my flesh
which weeps blood and other substances.

Oh I am terrified of the day
you find out what I am—
when you follow the smears of blood

all the way down the corridor, Victorian drapery
catching fire from the temperature of it all
the walls epileptic with heat waves.

I am down the end of this corridor
sweating profusely in my own self-created furnace
like a madwoman in an attic.

Every metaphor I try and use to explain myself
just ends up back at a woman who’s insane
or an animal, whatever the difference is.

I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this, but I do.
Shapes are moving in my red wallpaper
shapes that are shaped like me.


Molly Crighton is a Dunedin writer. Her work has appeared in Landfall, a fine line, Starling, Tarot, Takahē, and The Cormorant. She placed third in the 2021 Page and Blackmore story competition, was a resident for the 2021 New Zealand Young Writers’ Festival, and was a featured poet for 2019’s National Poetry Day.