Dead girls don’t go the dying route to get known.
You’ll find us anonymous still, splayed in Buicks, 
carried swaying like calves, our dead hefts swung 
from ankles, wrists, hooked by hands and handed
over to strangers slippery as blackout. Slammed
down, the mud on our dress is black as her dress,
worn out as a throw-rug beneath feet that stomp 
out the most intricate weave. It ought not sadden 
us, but sober us. Sylvia Plath killed herself. She ate 
her sin. Her eye got stuck on a diamond stickpin. 
You take Blake over breakfast, only to be bucked 
out your skull by a cat-call crossing a parking lot. 
Consuming her while reviling her, conditioned to 
hate her for her appetite alone: her problem was 
she thought too much? Needling an emblem’s ink 
onto your wrist, the surest defense a rose to reason 
against that bluest vein’s insistent wish. Let’s all 
us today finger-sweep our cheek-bones with two
blood-marks and ride that terrible train homeward 
while looking back at our blackened eyes inside 
tiny mirrors fixed inside our plastic compacts. We 
could not have known where she began given how 
we were, from the start, made to begin where she 
ends. In this way, she’s no way to make her amends.

Cate Marvin

 

(Today makes the anniversary Sylvia Plath took her own life. Not something to be celebrated, but something that tortured souls can keep in the backs of their brains when the going gets tough and you long to be immortalized through prose. To cure your ails, just read. Read read read relate and then start over again.)