These pieces are part of a larger project made up of poems that were written with their lexicons restricted to only the words present in word-banks I assembled. These word-banks/spreadsheets contained every word found on a single page of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and every word from a single page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The poems are intended to open a line of communication between the two works, which are both New York stories highlighting the failures and limitations of the American Dream during decades marked by excess.
A tan & good-looking Somebody
Scene two:
Woman in
lime
Woman with once-
rosy skin
My ghost has squeezed
the light from
A totally gone
expression
On her face
And the truth is just
What did
or didn’t
happen
Please listen
I’ve lost
my nerve
Panic
Touching me everywhere
Like
water
Extra-constructed living
Heavy is the head
that houses
the silver tongue
The silver screen
that stretched my tasteful
corpse across the grass
Fender gliding in to twist me bloody
& then your disappearing trick
But isn’t it true
that anyone could crack up
Anyone could put on the raincoat
& be shifted
Could come to shoulder
this suitcase of meat
Chelsea Margaret Bodnar semi-unironically says “they’re literally me!” in reference to all manner of toxic fictional characters. She is co-editor of the online literary magazine Everything in Aspic and the author of three chapbooks: Basement Gemini (Hyacinth Girl Press), OUR HOME CAN BE A DANGEROUS PLACE (Grey Book Press) and SNOWBOAT TO NOWHERE (Grey Book Press). Her poetry can be found in many publications, including Sugared Water, The Bennington Review, The Destroyer, Rogue Agent, FreezeRay, Menacing Hedge and Sad Girl Review. More: Insta @the_wasteland_cometh