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| Credit Girl | |
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| Credit Girl Kneeling, her thighs spread, her bejeweled bra lifting her breasts for adoration, pearls encircling her neck and crowning her head, she is a princess of desire. He reaches for her, then hesitates. That dead tree is alive, and walking. The innocent tire swing leftover from childhood, still and unremarkable, he recognizes now as the hook with which God trolls for lost souls, an empty purse its bait. Look carefully, he warns himself: that discarded Visa, the Trinity of gold bullion, and the smiley-face button, communion wafer for the Holy Consumerist Church of Usury. Anything can be bought, even this sexy, innocent girl from Poland. What is the price for lebensraum? Babi Yar, the Katyn forest, a Persian desert whose black veins are leeching the planet’s heart? We are never that kind of people. He reaches towards her again – she is so fetching. “Don’t die before you’re dead.” He knows if he touches her, removes those coins from her mouth and eyes, she will come to life with his death inside her. Still, if he kneels beside her, with her, if she will let him take her place, well, then we might begin to get somewhere beyond this executioner’s block, somewhere . . Marc Harshman, (poet & children’s author), Wheeling, West Virginia Credit Girl sometimes a thought is just a thought a data store of illuminations and shadows overheard words and binary meanderings the mind a slave to its less intelligent pulmonary Master who owns the farm through a series of unfortunate events and who we let think runs the show the original whore sold in the market down in New Orleans fascinated by shiny objects nailed to the fingers of the wives of her customers who pay to rent the one hole from her that they don't have eyes downcast after the deed he exits rapidly through the turnstile silence cutting through the sex thick in the air her future clear from the pigeon hole back to the dream state she goes where the writing on the wall is never writ slumber consistently delivers her a delectable absurdity where machinery grows from flesh and skulls crack like perfect boiled eggs and she can watch Captain Hook runs barefoot through the Garden of Eden another day, another squalor may have made another impression:ist dead set on a quad theme instead of this, a cleansed palette, but still an inescapable ancestor of the trinity royal, reverent, revered. Sir Real. a right turn on the factory-made fork in the road and horse hair meets wood meets canvas it didn't end up the smoke-stained beige on the mute wall behind the thinking whore rendering these words as boring as watching paint dry Jennifer Thompson, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Credit Girl Weighed down Forced upon bended knee Pushed to death of self By society She wanted to be perfection Paid for new everything Now she is the perfect conception Of death by the "jones" She fell hook line and Coach For unattainable class placement She looks gorgeous in her debt Living in a dirty basement No Fifth Avenue home No on lookers awed No trip to Paris, the Islands or Rome No one to save her Her stale money The promises of one more day She can do nothing now She is lifeless like autumn's bare trees Gone are the parties Gone is the false wealth Gone are the men Gone are the girl and her sense of self La,Keisha Thorpe, Bath, Pennsylvania Credit Girl At the end of the day in a sunset blaze Selena Hamilton, the credit girl who'd been selfish all her life, found remorse. The remorse ate at her insides, burning into her guts and refusing to let her rest and when she slept she suffered visions. Nightmares. But this perpetual one was different;she was living IN it, experiencing every surreal thread and reacting as the message got to her. “Too late! Too late!” shouted the wood spirit,the tree god, the 'Old Man of the Woods' on drawing closer to Selena, out of the cloud bank. She caught the whiff of expensive Parisian perfume. Dior. Sandlewood too, and she thought of all she had ever used on her body. Through her coin-covered eyes the coiled rope of death swung closer, sometimes changing to a tyre Selena played with as a child. Tyre? Rubber? Recycle. She never had. ”Too late!” She fingered the pearls around her neck and the religious medal of The Blessed Virgin to keep her safe. A choked off scream escaped from her body as she realised her chances of happiness to function as woman, as a mother were slipping fast like the fashion coat off her shoulders which she'd worn on the Paris-Warsaw catwalk. Selena craved a last chance and in her garish nightmare, her feet scrabbled in desperation. Money meant nothing; the useless Visa card testified and the gold Z-bar floated as light a feather. It taunted her. In her tortured surreal state she knew only those vivid glimpses of present, past and the future. Beyond which Selena had NOTHING. -Cleveland W. Gibson, (Author of Billabongo) Faringdon, Oxon, United Kingdom |
