Writing Sample - Carmen Cornue

Last Dance with Mary Shelley

Published in The Atlanta Review (Volume 27, Issue 1)

The poem is a hedonist, a gal about town.
You'll find her in a cabana
teetering on velvet platforms
tearing through Valley of the Dolls.

Sometimes the poem is gluttonous with ideas.
You could say she's drunk on her own aura.
As the poet laments age,
the poem bathes in immortality.

"I only have a short window of time
to be a beautiful haunted woman,"
the poet scribbles in her notebook,
while the poem giggles and does another line.

Emerging from numerous drafts,
at the crescendo of a thunderstorm-
the poem arrives in her wedding gown.
"It's alive!" the poet screams.

The poem arches her cobbled bones
against the surgical table.
She is the creature and the bride;
a lace veil caught and torn in her own mangled hand.