Kathleen McClung
"Thelma and Louise" Alternate Ending
for Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis
No driving off the cliff into blue sky.
Instead, you pocket the ignition key,
surrender to a system that will try
you fairly, understanding fully why
you shot a rapist, why you had to flee
and drive off in a panic, warm night sky
embracing, sheltering. You testify,
the courtroom still but steeped in empathy.
Surrender to our system. Wise allies
will counsel you, lend hands and minds, untie
hard knots of fear and guilt, and therapy
will feel like driving into vast blue sky
yet bind you to our earth. Your bright, new life:
belonging to a sisterhood of Me
Too and surrendering the search for why
it happened on your fishing trip. Mourn. Cry.
But hold fast to your ingenuity.
No driving off the cliff into blue sky.
Surrender. Craft new systems. Do not die.
Dangerous Liaisons Triolet
For Glenn Close
Silk gowns and powdered wigs—my fine disguise.
I am a virtuoso of deceit.
No one detects the malice in my eyes.
Silk gowns and powdered wigs—my fine disguise
for cruelty. My painted lips purr lies
that lead to dueling on a snowy street.
Silk gowns and powdered wigs—my last disguise.
My epitaph—A Virtuoso of Deceit.
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| Maureen Alsop:I often create visual art as a memorialization to the closure of a written work. However, many of these visual pieces arrived as a trajectory while writing a larger 'work-in-progress.' The text within the visual poems do not speak to the content of the larger work but are autonomous, acting as bridge between the written and visual bodies. The original text draws upon ghosts in the hall of battles. It is a glittering solar analemma, an unattested revolution, an infinity reflected in ellipses, omissions, and disintegration. A full collection representing many of these images came to fruition recently in Tender to Empress (Wet Cement Press). Yet the act of creating from text continues, as the digital collages here also include newer works based on miscellaneous notes, old emails, and most recently a short story, "The Unnamed Woman of Mary River" (forthcoming at South Dakota Review). The title to these are based on cargo ships which I pass on my daily commute from island to mainland. These small cities of people, afloat for weeks on end out at sea, are a looming story that embarks and disembarks in my imagination.
The visual poems are crafted under the mechanics of "Écriture Féminine," literally "women's writing." These principals advance a feminine perspective. I write from parallels, cyclical slips through stream of conscious and fragmentary processes. The writing exists as rough erotic. As talisman. Interpersonal in their ruptures and syntax, soft in their discomforts; a splintered narrative. Through writing, I can go anywhere and never be found.
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