Girls with Insurance

 

 

They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights, is Aforementioned Productions latest from Gillian Devereux and it is a punch in the gut. This small collection of poetry carries a spark of imagination in its throat, and reading the language is reminiscent of grit and fire igniting the page. The content of the collection focuses on the sideshow carnival acts, and the fantastical tone carries me to a Tom Waits style of readability, that grabs your hair and makes you watch the story unfold. Nobody but him has made the carnival so sexy, raw, or appealing until now. There is a little bit of everything; dancing bears, an assistant who can’t escape the clutches of a knife thrower, and the integrity to explain why though mostly it’s a hoax, the magic of desperation is real along the cheap thrills and lost souls of the side show act.

I knew a real woman once.

 

We shared a love of rough, true freedom

and gritty, honest romance.

 

Honest romance, mind you.

Not that Hollywood, silver screen, sitcom horse-shit.

 

 

Put the fun back in funeral
—on a bumper sticker

Death's no laughing matter.

Unless you're watching
a Monty Python marathon at four in the morning and
the power goes off cuz there's a really big storm

I cut my hair in every hotel room
on the island, shave the back of my neck
until it feels clean, like a boy's.  I bend
to sweep the hair.  The rest washes down the drain.

1. When your son is sixteen and is poisoned with PCP, have him arrested.

2. When your son is seventeen and living in your second home, inform him ten days before his birthday that his gift will be a swift eviction with a bonus of his own savings. If you are his mother, use a whopping .00019% of the total child support you accrued on the little bastard to buy him a bus ticket to the other side of the Mason-Dixon. Be distracted by your sister's son's needs as he boards that $73 one-way bus out of Bangor.