Day 18
“New Prescription”
Staring contest:
Me and you at this bottle of pills.
Go!
If the best form of comedy punches up,
consider me Big Pharma
with no one else to hit.
It’s not your fault, little ones.
It’s just chemicals.
“We’re all just walking experiments, baby,”
says the psychiatrist.
Groovy, man.
Day 19
“namesake”
Every month with the moon I growgrowgrow hair,
thick, dark brown, wavy,
and abandon my human clothes and home to run wild
in the jungle that is my city.
I am the werewolf you have come to know and love,
She who howls at the ruins of the oldest steel plant in the city,
she who prowls at the gravesites of the old stockyards.
I feel the blood of the city beneath my paws,
my own heritage pumps in my veins,
the voices of my grandfathers and grandmothers quietly echoing
their beliefs in the promise of the great wheel of the midwest,
the giant gear that kept the country turning,
connecting arm and arm.
I run down the lakefront invisible,
my thick hair flows in the wind.
In the dark,
where the horizon meets itself,
the moon has its own reflection,
sparkling as diamonds on black silk.
I howl.
Every month, at least once,
I become the werewolf She,
always with a protective shield of thick, dark hair,
and I run,
freer than I ever have been as a woman.
werewolf girlfriend 