Susana H. Case

Painted

In high school, we painted the rips
on our pantyhose with clear nail
polish to put a stop to the nylon ladders

running up and down our legs. I wish
I could now so easily use a particular polish
to stave off each undoing—

the color Obsessed, to keep men from
abandoning me, too many of the ones
I've loved drifted or overdosed. Or make

life happen in a better way with Lucky Stars,
a polish that finds a live-in barista
for my morning coffee when,

with mechanical ineptitude, I can't figure 
how to froth the milk. And OMG,
the lacquer that magically picks

the better numbers on my lottery
ticket. Yes, all these colors are variants               
of red. And red lipstick, too—a talisman

against loss. Bad Blood, under the Covid
mask for all the places my mouth goes
and doesn't belong, and paint on my toes,

Smooch, even in winter, because it's been
over ten thousand days without a break
in desire—and you never know.

The Last Time I Got My Ass Kicked

Three girls, maybe from my junior high,
bigger than me with Ronettes-style
beehive hair. Maybe they were bored,
and maybe I shouldn’t have said Fuck you
after one tried to knock me down
on Queens Boulevard one Friday night.
Maybe then I wouldn’t have walked around
for weeks with a face purpling into yellow,
feeling lucky their go-go boots hadn’t knocked
out any teeth. I couldn’t breathe
without my ribs reminding me. The principal
of the school took me, my mother,
and a young cop to classroom after classroom—
filled with colorful posters promoting
benevolence, students looking up
from notebooks—to see if I could identify
any of them, but it was impossible. Maybe
they weren’t from my school. It’s likely
they beat up other girls until old enough
to have their own angry kids, then maybe
beat up those kids, or tamped down their rage
to become improbably good mothers.
Maybe there are people who would want
that sort of mother—one who had seen
enough to be transformed. My friend,
who lived next door, witnessed the attack,
offered to help find them, but
her parents wouldn’t let her—they had
survived the Brownshirts and were afraid.

The Depression

I wouldn't say it got to the point
where electroconvulsive therapy was called for,
but my body did feel leaden, movement
uninteresting to me. During the day I mostly
slept; during the night I watched home shopping
channels, too enervated
to buy anything. The psychiatrist held
a Yorkshire Terrier on his lap,
and that was distracting because I was there to talk
about family deaths, but also the death
of my dog. I obsessed about death.
The Yorkshire Terrier slept during the sessions,
mirroring my fatigue. I was allergic
to the first set of pills, which turned my skin
into writing paper—dermatographia.
I was too sad to write anything pithy,
scratched my name obsessively in cursive—
the raised surfaces on my legs
a reminder that I still existed. What can I say

about how melancholy released
its hold on me? After eighteen months,
tired of the second set of pills, I was slightly
less tired of everything else. I thought I might try
having sex again, cooking,
took small steps to rejoin the world.

 

Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn't Love, Broadstone Books, and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and as an English-Ukrainian edition, Шотландська Кав'ярня by Slapering Hol Press. https://www.susanahcase.com <https://www.susanahcase.com/>