“Screaming at the Brooklyn Bridge,” a poem by Mari Pack.

Nobody wants to live with a corpse …

Screaming at the Brooklyn Bridge

After Robert Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue”

*

I weigh one hundred and five pounds

after my New York breakfast

of vanilla Soylent, all I can keep down these days, thanks

to the anti-depressant. I swallow it, beige smoothie,

every four to six hours.

SSRI? Every twenty-four.

*

My roommate asks if I will eat something.

No, a real something,

and I do.

Nobody wants to live with a corpse.

I want to show him — all of them —

strut around this city, skin melting off bones, screaming, “I am here!”

to the Brooklyn Bridge, all 14,680 tons of her.

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Mari Pack’s work has appeared in Yes, Poetry, Quail Bell Magazine, and others. The Description of a New World, her first chapbook, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2019. Mari is an editor for Guideposts.

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Featured image: The Scream, undated drawing by Edvard Munch.