2 Poems - Claire Marie Anderson

an actor’s dilemma 

stanislavski doesn’t really teach you

what to do when you miss a line

when you’re all alone outside, like your poor

little girl character

and you get as transfixed in the light

as you’re supposed to

and you feel better when someone else missteps

and the performance is tomorrow

and you’re thinking too much

and you’re worried you scared

the neighbors with your projection

the projection you learned so young

you’re still so young

you live, and she lives, and you’ll

live together tomorrow night,

and just one night more

update: you missed the other line

instead

when i was walking this morning i passed a squirrel who looked at me as i unwittingly made my way toward its fallen comrade and it led me to imagine what happened when that one had seen the other one killed by my neighbor’s big pick up truck in front of me that i can’t look at when i walk past it parked by its house anymore

Squirrel and squirrel

Met across the wheel of life

One still, one alive.

Life goes on, like a Bob Dylan song,

and the fresh squirrel corpse laid across

from a little tree grove

by my humble abode.

Somebody drove over it, again and again,

but the body stayed whole.

(At least by the time I came

around the bend.)

She was all gone by the next day, though.

Free from the melee

of 2020 neighborhoods,

and the footsteps of May.

Humble and helpful,

the funny furry cherubs.

I’m grateful for the place

they take up in my domestic space.

And I hope the ones who dream

of becoming Belkas and Strelkas

get to survive again,

up on Venera.

Claire Marie Anderson is an Art History student and writer from Houston, TX. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The Magazine, The Decadent Review, The Fabulist, and Bridge Eight, among other publications. She has contributed audio plays to Cone Man Running’s War of the Words podcast, and is a fiction reader for Tatterhood Review.

“I don’t like writing about myself. Ironic, because I have not failed to keep a journal since I was a child. When something of interest happens to me, I allegorize it; I’ll write a story about falling in love with an invisible man, or a makeshift Twilight Zone episode about the end of a relationship. Both of these poems were written in brief moments of personal tension or sadness, then disregarded for fear they were not allegorical enough. I periodically go back to these drafts, maybe generalize a line or two, and then disregard them again. They bring me back to those moments, so fleeting in retrospect, and make me wonder if the commemoration was worth it.”