[145 words]
No exit
except in case of emergency.
Give us the rope and we’ll hang ourselves.
Sappho drowned herself. Ophelia drowned herself. Virginia Woolf drowned herself.
When Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven, Anne Sexton said, “That death was mine!”
She put on a fur coat, poured herself a vodka, and started the car.
Zelda Fitzgerald threw herself down a flight of stairs, burned her clothes in the bathtub, dug her own grave.
“Every woman loves a fascist.”
Abort mission.
Submission.
Operation midnight climax.
Cinderella complex.
Sleeping Beauty syndrome.
Historical, hysterical.
Hypersexual
-ized.
Our undeveloped chests of drawers.
Our nightmare gowns.
Our pedophiliac pedicures.
We lock pantries with skeleton keys and haunt ourselves, anorexic.
Inside voices in our heads.
We’re ugly stepsisters,
cutting off parts of ourselves to fit into glass slippers.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Molly Rose Strugatz is a writer, artist, and teacher from Brooklyn, living in Barcelona. A graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, her work explores community, nature, and folklore. Her writing has appeared in Folly Journal, Parabola, Tummy Ache, Outhouse Magazine, Virgo Venus Press, and elsewhere.
