Self-Portrait as Her Dark Academia Story
Didn’t start with a murder at a prep school
or painting her library black and decorating with rhinestone skulls
or even dyeing her hair purple and dealing drugs out of a girlfriend’s dorm room
but since her favorite female characters tend towards the villainess
and her house is covered with pictures of animal interlopers, feral predators, wolves, tigers, and foxes curled above their human female forms
In her early adolescence, a lot of black – a slash of fuchsia lip
Dark smears of blood – on her thighs, or her face. Bruises appear to bloom from nothing
Perfumes with names like Poison, Panthere, and Angel, notes of civet cat and wood and bitter almond
Lace-up boots that leave a mark
who didn’t want to be a princess, a victim, a blonde in trouble
so she always wore flats and learned to throw a knife and shoot a gun.
She learned to recognize the poisons inside wildflowers
A typewriter with cryptic notes on paper, fractured poems
She can wrap myself in bubble-gum pink, put on lipstick, run as far as she can, now she’s finally escaped her origin story
but still in the nightmares, in the shadows, memory of murderous but glossy teens, their teeth canine-sharp in the light, laughing…
The Villainess Has No Regrets
and has taken up forest bathing.
Sometimes she hears ghosts in the trees,
the dead making their mournful noises.
She herself has given up singing
but stands in the wind making her own
kind of music. Crunch of leaves under
metallic heels; the swift swoop of her cape
in the branches. So, she is alone.
Her tiara has grown teeth; her skin
no longer pervious to cold or the scratching
of briars. She’s not saying there aren’t moments
she doesn’t think about…what happened before.
The foxes and dragons provide enough
companionship, her castle growing spires
in the night. You mistook her for
misunderstood but it was only after
she embraced her inner demon that
she truly understood. The winter ice,
the bursting of streams, the flowers
that fall beneath her feet: elemental.
What did she destroy? Who did she
burn, turn to ice, outrun, outkill,
to reach this ultimate conclusion?
Nothing that she misses. No one
she couldn’t do without.
Jeannine Hall Gailey (alias Triple X, Radioactive Girl, the Pink Apocalypse) started her criminal mastermind career at a young age. Brought up near a nuclear test site, she studied biology, journalism, and poetry to bring her ultimate power. She’s the author of six books, including Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Field Guide to the End of the World, and her latest from BOA, Flare, Corona, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Jeannine has MS and has served as Redmond, Washington’s Poet Laureate. One of her favorite stories of a historical feud was how though Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were supposedly friendly colleagues, Freud frequently fainted whenever he had to meet with Jung. He told people that Jung had a “death wish” towards him. Jeannine’s web site is www.webbish6.com.
