‘goodness makes me want to be sick’

                      —Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart




Her revenge will be

personal and artistic: she wants it
each way—poems spiked

with spite—a familiar face:
I think of Lydia Deetz’s

neat features, peach
eyelids, cheek and brow bones,

Winona’s cartoon counterpart
bubbling out in my slow brain.

‘You have to be good’, you’re not
just getting an academic

job in this country
this clown says, crunching

numbers and casual causalities.
She’s not getting off

the treadmill, but her spite will
be elusive and allusive: her once

friend’s face
front-paged with

wage theft (shock her dead).
There’s a Smirko sneer she knows

but no one’s here to kiss crumb
maidens, spiders

would be more sociable, I mean
a particular kind

of aetiology: arachnids
in patient repetition, mending

and knowing. It’s not straightforward
misanthropy, mise-en-scène

of the hot-desk hallway, its hubris.
Her fair-weather friends in poetry

said she was sleeping
her way ahead. You have to

be good, you’re not
paying attention, finger

on the possibilities, pulsing. Better off
banging out some

shock jock expressions, appropriating
the pain of others, it’s okay

to fake it a while. I think spiders might
do it better though, thread

with integrity. Her insecurity,
doubling, could meet its own

dull brain in a meme.