Cara Eileen Peterhansel

The Party

“Oh! Thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death.”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

Here’s death
sliding down the banisters
wiping clean the fingerprints
of my distinguished houseguests
I feel it in my feet, a burning
spreading to a flush that Richard
says he likes (“the party’s 
so exciting isn’t it?”) and runs
his hand across my cheek. It’s cold,
I know, because my skirt is in
a burst of flame and in my head
a skull’s split open on the pavement
a military man, fallen,
from an open window, not fallen,
no, he jumped. Slipped through that final
threshold, now a bloody splatter.
 
If I had died that moment, when
Sally smiled, dressed in white,
I would have gone, blown lightly out,
a candle’s final puff of smoke
I’d have had that one last sizzle,
But he, like a discarded coin,
hit the fountain bottom soundless.
 
Here they speak of death, their voices
pick up from one another, carrying
that single flower petal,
dancing through the chairs and plates
of food until it falls fast, landing
in the corner. Now they speak
of hat boxes and perfume and newly
published books, how lovely the weather
was today. The banister
is gleaming at me, almost winking,
“Here’s death,” it says to me.
 
                        ~Clarissa Dalloway

---

The Window

“The world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes.”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

How might one set about it?
All the pebbles on the
walkways chant in tiny
voices, tugging on my
brain with crab-like pincers
edging close to egg
me on. The eggs gleam
their stark fresh shine, but not
even the chickens tell me
how to do it. Dew drops
on the carpet, tracks from
military boots, with voices
sharp as crystal shards.
 
I’m at the base now, in the
kitchen, but my wife is
here with me instead
of the boys. She’s saying
something, but I can only
hear the butter knives in
the drawers, their iridescent
clinking, sliding on the
wood. How might I stop the
clamouring? The doctor
tells me “rest” while our worn
blankets and the peeling
wallpaper hiss
their rhythmic mantra.
But how would I?
 
Of all the screaming objects
in this house, none
will tell me how our knives
that barely cut tough grinds
of meat, in my weak hands
might obliterate me,
explode me like a thousand
starlights. Or maybe
a gaspipe through my lungs,
filling me with poison,
air that’s fit for me.
The doctor doles my pills,
so even they can’t save me.
 
And yet, the air is warm
coming through the half-cracked
window. And I sit there,
tasting the sun and open
the window a bit farther.
And that, my God, is how.
 
                        ~Septimus Warren Smith




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Cara Peterhansel is a 22 year-old female poet from Connecticut and a recent graduate of Union College. She is currently living in Western Massachusetts, working as a Preschool Assistant Teacher. This is Cara's first publication.