Theatre du Grand Guignol We could never equal Buchenwald. In those days before the war, Everyone felt what happened onstage was impossible. Our nightmares of sadism and perversion Played out under angels at watch over the orchestra, Our fantasies fulfilled in the private rental boxes Once occupied by supplicating daughters of Christ-- We, aroused by the unthinkable, The unwatchable. Crimes in the madhouse The laboratory of hallucinations The torture garden and guillotine The insane street urchins, prostitutes and apaches. Lilly Laudanum became the most assassinated women in the world, After she kissed the leper. Shot with a rifle, raped, hanged, quartered, Burned, cut with surgical tools, poisoned, Devoured by a puma— Strangled by her own perfectly matched pearls. She is all of us, wandering In this world afraid of the foreign, the unknown. We could never imagine it possible. Now we know these things, And worse Are possible in reality. Image: ‘thelightingman’, Flickr ![]() Bio: Susan Cossette is the author of Peggy Sue Messed Up . . . and other poems. Her work has appeared in Rust & Moth, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Clockwise Cat, among others. She is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. By day, she is communications director for Voices of September 11th, a nonprofit that works with those impacted by mass violence and terrorism. Comments are closed.
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December 2024
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