Thrush Poetry Journal
  • ABOUT
  • ARCHIVES
  • JANUARY 2023
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • AWARDS
  • MASTHEAD

Kendra DeColo & Tyler Mills
​

What to Wear to Report Your Stalker to HR
 
Wear your most earnest look. Wear a watch.
            Wear a shirt that says, I did not ask
 
f
or this. If you wear a skirt with diamond
           stripes up the seam, the receptionist
 
will say, You look cute. Does this mean
            you look stalkable? Does this mean
 
if the phone rings and it’s him, your
           voice will erupt into a murder
 
of crows that cloud the halls so
           fluorescent-lit corners push him away
 
with glossy wings? My friend never reported
            her murder. That’s how it works. She left
 
her husband weeping in their tin-roofed
            shack, the coils of a stove top counterfeiting
 
a smolder. Her nails were red that day.
            She left him under the tin roof that some would want
 
to say was punctuated with stars, the metal,
             I mean, not her body, how it buckled
 
under heavy rain. He wept and then when he wasn’t
            weeping, he was a cloud. Do not think
 
of her body when you grind the pen,  
            scratching the letters of your stalker’s name
 
in thin blue ink. Think. That’s how it works—you
              see him, write him in the spangled cells
 
of your neurons, and the cops read
            your face and see you as him. Keep a diary
 
of his movements, one said, and you thought this:

             sunflower fields, the tangle of metal
 
rusting in the scrapyard, horses gathering
             slowly in the distance like a cluster of silver clouds.
 
Wear a whistle. Wear a lie-proof coat.
            Wear the wind. The police chief counted my deaths:
 
first, red roses rotting on my windshield.
        next, the window of my bedroom framing me
 
in a pilled, sky-blue bra. Then, my house.
            Rape would be next, he said with a catch
 
in his breath, like a mothy bouquet.
           As a child you waited for the wolf
 
to turn belly up, expose the jangled
            teeth, a mouth of burnt opals. This probably
 
happens to you all the time, the cop smiles. Unlatch

            your jaw. Let the stones fall to his feet.
 
The head of HR finally speaks, looking me up
             and down―first my toes mashed into my boots, his eyes
 
dragging doubt up my legs, then my high-
            necked sweater, my mouth, my eyes. Like a bat
 
adjusting its wings, he shuffles my list of incidents. Just look
           at this evidence. Who is to say you aren’t stalking him?






Kendra DeColo is the author of two poetry collections: My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, VIDA, and elsewhere.
Visit here at: http://kendradecolo.tumblr.com/bio



 

Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press 2013). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, The Believer, Georgia Review, and Blackbird, and have won magazine awards from Gulf Coast, the Crab Orchard Review, and Third Coast.
Visit her at: https://tylermills.com/




Return to September 2017 Edition