The People’ s Peril by Brooke Gross

everyone’s hometown has
an old-money house / they
swore they’d live in someday
we looked up at broken street
lamps / pretended they were
stage lights / practiced for
talk shows in the shower
then she fucking did it
the news came like a last love
her spotlight locked on us like targets
shotgun shells of similes that outshined
stars / built armor out of metaphor / made
meaning out of memory / catapulted
contempt into crystal skies / opened diary
pages like a parchment poppy
they called her delicate / venomous /
witch / fool like they could make mockery
of magic while manifesting misery
but love is not a monograph / hate
does not endure – that is what
the poet’s torture taught us
when naive became narcissism /
innocence begot ignorance /
sexuality bore self-repression
they begged for her blood / a death
certificate in golden pigment / a
promise from the angel of scapegoatsto substantiate their silent sins
the only thing more dangerous
than a legend is a template / “Who’s
afraid of little old me? You should be.”
not of she / those who will come
after me – good girls told not to
wait or submit / hold their tongue
or breath or double-edged cents
they wanted an apologist
the shiny fraud of an alchemist
but she was never mere anthologist
ink is always anthropologist
you bought tickets to the autopsy /
rented daggers for the dissertation
defense – ready, willing, and wanting
for the albatross’ slaughter
but your evidence is irreverent / the
ricochet sets precedent for bandits
and bookworms with hearts on their
sleeves / veins filled with ink
making muses out of molehills – who
are you to decide? which mountains
to bury / which ones to climb
your wounds don’t have to heal pretty

Brooke Gross is a Kentucky-based poet who takes inspiration from both modern and classic writers, grounding much of her work in nature but often looking for opportunities to experiment with rhythm and line breaks. Her debut collection, Traitorous Muse, was published in 2023 and is available on Amazon. Brooke's work has since appeared in anthologies from wildscape. literary journal and Arcana Poetry Press as well as, most recently, moth eaten mag’s issue iv: birth. She currently works as a librarian at Western Kentucky University.